Space and astronomy news
It’s a measure of human ingenuity and curiosity that scientists debate the possibility of life on Venus. They established long ago that Venus’ surface is absolutely hostile to life. But didn’t scientists find a biomarker in the planet’s clouds? Could life exist there, never touching the planet’s sweltering surface?
It seems to depend on who you ask.
Continue reading “Could Life Exist in Water Droplet Worlds in Venus’ Atmosphere?”
There’s a lot we don’t know about the planet nearest to us. Venus is shrouded in clouds, making speculation about what’s happening on its surface a parlor game for many planetary scientists for decades. But one idea that always seems to come up in those conversations – volcanoes. It’s clear that Venus has plenty of volcanoes – estimates center around about 85,000 of them in total. However, science is still unclear as to whether there is any active volcanism on Venus or not. A new set of missions to the planet will hopefully shed some light on the topic – and a new paper from researchers from Europe looks at how we might use information from those missions to do so.
Continue reading “How Much of Venus’s Atmosphere is Coming from Volcanoes?”
In a win for planetary scientists, and planetary geologists in particular, it was announced at the recent 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas earlier this month that NASA’s VERITAS mission to the planet Venus has been reinstated into NASA’s Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) budget with a scheduled launch date of 2031, with the unofficial announcement coming on the first day of the conference, March 11, 2024, and being officially announced just a few days later. This comes after VERITAS experienced a “soft cancellation” in March of last year when NASA revealed its FY24 budget, providing VERITAS only $1.5 million, which was preceded by the launch of VERITAS being delayed a minimum of three years due to findings from an independent review board in November 2022.
Continue reading “NASA’s VERITAS Mission Breathes New Life”
Ask any astronomer, and they will tell you that all of the planets in the Solar System (including those “dwarf planets”) have satellites, with the exception of Mercury and Venus. However, that is not entirely the case, as Venus has what is known as a “quasi-moon” – a large asteroid that orbits the planet but is not gravitationally bound to it. In 2002, astronomer Brian Skiff discovered this body using the Discovery Telescope at the Lowell Observatory (where Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto). Until recently, this object was known by its official designation, 2002VE68.
However, on February 5th, 2024, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) conferred a new name for the object: Zoozve. The name was announced in a bulletin (vol. 4, no. 5) issued by the IAU’s Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature (WGSBN). The IAU, which is responsible for naming celestial objects, traditionally prefers to assign names that come from mythological traditions to objects that cross Earth’s orbit. But in this case, the origins of Zoozve’s strange name are more of (to quote Bob Ross) a “happy accident,” where a children’s poster that showed the object led to a conversation and an official request.
Continue reading “Venus “Quasi-moon” Just Got a Name. Henceforth, it Shall be Called Zoozve.”
Venus is only slightly smaller than the Earth, and so has enjoyed billions of years of a warm heart. But for this planet, sometimes called Earth’s sister, that heat has betrayed it. That planet is now wrapped in suffocating layers of a poisonous atmosphere made of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. The pressures on the surface reach almost 100 times the air pressure at Earth’s sea level. The average temperatures are over 700 degrees Fahrenheit, more than hot enough to melt lead, while the deepest valleys see records of over 900 degrees.
Continue reading “Why Venus Died”
A recent study published in Astrobiology investigates the potential habitability in the clouds of Venus, specifically how amino acids, which are the building blocks of life, could survive in the sulfuric acid-rich upper atmosphere of Venus. This comes as the potential for life in Venus’ clouds has become a focal point of contention within the astrobiology community in the last few years. On Earth, concentrated sulfuric acid is known for its corrosivity towards metals and rocks and for absorbing water vapor. In Venus’ upper atmosphere, it forms from solar radiation interacting with sulfur dioxide, water vapor, and carbon dioxide.
Continue reading “Venus’ Clouds Contain Sulfuric Acid. That’s Not a Problem for Life.”
In Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, the famous words “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” adorn the gates of hell. Interestingly enough, Dante’s vision of hell is an apt description of what conditions are like on Venus. With an average temperature of 450 °C (842 °F), atmospheric pressures 92 times that of Earth, and clouds of sulfuric acid rain to boot, Venus is the most hostile environment in the Solar System. It is little wonder why space agencies, going all the way back to the beginning of the Space Age, have had such a hard time exploring Venus’ atmosphere.
Despite that, there are many proposals for missions that could survive Venus’ hellish environment long enough to accomplish a sample return mission. One such proposal, the Sample Return from the Surface of Venus, comes from aerospace engineer and author Geoffrey Landis and his colleagues at the NASA Glenn Research Center. Their proposed concept was selected for this year’s NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. It consists of a solar-powered aircraft that would fashion propellant directly from Venus’ atmosphere and deploy a sample-return rover to the surface.
Continue reading “NASA Selects a Sample Return Mission to Venus”
When scientists detected phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere in 2020, it triggered renewed, animated discussions about Venus and its potential habitability. It would be weird if the detection didn’t generate interest since phosphine is a potential biomarker. So people were understandably curious. Unfortunately, further study couldn’t confirm its presence.
But even without phosphine, Venus’ atmosphere is full of chemical intrigue that hints at biological processes. Is it time to send an astrobiology mission to our hellish sister planet?
Continue reading “There are Mysteries at Venus. It’s Time for an Astrobiology Mission”
During the 1960s, the first robotic explorers began making flybys of Venus, including the Soviet Venera 1 and the Mariner 2 probes. These missions dispelled the popular myth that Venus was shrouded by dense rain clouds and had a tropical environment. Instead, these and subsequent missions revealed an extremely dense atmosphere predominantly composed of carbon dioxide. The few Venera landers that made it to the surface also confirmed that Venus is the hottest planet in the Solar System, with average temperatures of 464 °C (867 °F).
These findings drew attention to anthropogenic climate change and the possibility that something similar could happen on Earth. In a recent study, a team of astronomers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) created the world’s first simulation of the entire greenhouse process that can turn a temperate planet suitable for Life into a hellish, hostile one. Their findings revealed that on Earth, a global average temperature rise of just a few tens of degrees (coupled with a slight rise in the Sun’s luminosity) would be sufficient to initiate this phenomenon and render our planet uninhabitable.
Continue reading “It Doesn't Take Much to Get a Runaway Greenhouse Effect”
NASA is preparing to send humans back to the Moon with the Artemis missions in the next few years as part of the agency’s Moon to Mars Architecture with the long-term goal of landing humans on the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s or 2040s. But what about sending humans to other worlds of the Solar System? And, why not Venus? It’s closer to Earth than Mars by several tens of millions of kilometers, and despite its extremely harsh surface conditions, previous studies have suggested that life could exist in its clouds. In contrast, we have yet to find any signs of life anywhere on the Red Planet or in its thin atmosphere. So, should we send humans to Venus?
Continue reading “Should We Send Humans to Venus?”