“IF LIGHTNING exists in Venus’s atmosphere, it’s either extremely rare or
very different than terrestrial lightning,” says Donald Gurnett of the
University of Iowa.
In 1978 two Soviet landers detected low-frequency radio signals supposedly
from lightning. But Gurnett’s group reports that the Cassini spacecraft detected
only a few very weak radio pulses as it passed Venus in 1998 and 1999 (
Nature, vol 409, p 313). On Earth, there are about 70 strikes a second,
says Gurnett.
