Space and astronomy news
We’re lucky to have a neighbour like Venus, even though it’s totally inhospitable, wildly different from the other rocky planets, and difficult to study. Its thick atmosphere obscures its surface, and only powerful radar can penetrate it. Its extreme atmospheric pressure and high temperatures are barriers to landers or rovers.
It’s like having a mysterious exoplanet next door.
Continue reading “Venus is Like an Exoplanet that’s Right Next Door”
While Earth and Venus are approximately the same size and both lose heat at about the same rate, the internal mechanisms that drive Earth’s geologic processes differ from its neighbor. It is these Venusian geologic processes that a team of researchers led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology hope to learn more about as they discuss both the cooling mechanisms of Venus and the potential processes behind it.
Continue reading “Venus’ Outer Shell is Thinner and “Squishier” Than Previously Believed”
Sending a lander to Venus presents several huge engineering problems. Granted, we’d get a break from the nail-biting entry, descent and landing, since Venus’ atmosphere is so thick, a lander would settle gently to the surface like a stone settles in water — no sky cranes or retrorockets required.
But the rest of the endeavor is fraught with challenges. The average temperature at the surface is 455 degrees C (850 F), hot enough to melt lead. The mix of chemicals that make up the atmosphere, such as sulfuric acid, is corrosive to most metals. And the crushing atmospheric pressure is roughly equivalent to being 1,500 meters (5,000 ft) under water. These extreme environmental conditions are where metals and electronics go to die; therefore, the few Venus lander missions that have made it to the surface — like the Soviet Venera missions — only lasted two hours or less. Any future landers or rovers will need to have nearly super-hero-type characteristics to endure on the surface of Earth’s evil twin.
But there’s one additional challenge that might be close to being solved: creating batteries that can operate long enough in Venus’ hellish conditions to make a lander mission worth the effort.
Continue reading “Can a Venus Lander Survive Longer Than a Few Minutes?”
In a recent paper accepted to Contemporary Physics, a physicist from Imperial College London uses past missions and recent findings to encourage the importance of searching for life in the atmosphere of the solar system’s most inhospitable planet, Venus. This comes as a 2020 announcement claimed to have discovered the presence of phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere followed by follow-up observations from NASA’s recently-retired SOFIA aircraft in late 2022 that refuted it. Despite this, Dr. David Clements, who is a Reader in Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, recently told Universe Today that “there is something odd going on in the atmosphere of Venus.”
Continue reading “Physicist encourages continuing the search for life in Venus’ atmosphere”
When it comes to planetary exploration, particularly of Venus, a big part of the story is under the surface. It’s a story that ESA’s EnVision mission was selected to tell when it gets to the planet in the 2030s. That’s because the spacecraft will include a subsurface radar sounder (SRS) to “peek under the surface” of Venus.
Continue reading “ESA’s Upcoming Mission Will Tell us if Venus is Still Volcanically Active”
The on-again, off-again detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus appears to be off-again – for now. The latest study, based on data from the SOFIA telescope, reveals that the flying observatory didn’t see any signs of phosphine. According to the results, if there is any phosphine present in Venus’s atmosphere at all, it’s a maximum of about 0.8 parts per billion, much smaller than the initial estimate.
However, the team that made the initial detection of phosphine, which was announced in 2020, disagrees with the researchers’ interpretation of the SOFIA data.
Continue reading “SOFIA Fails to Find Phosphine in the Atmosphere of Venus, But the Debate Continues”
Is there anything good about volcanoes? They can be violent, dangerous, and unpredictable. For modern humans, volcanoes are mostly an inconvenience, sometimes an intriguing visual display, and occasionally deadly.
But when there’s enough of them, and when they’re powerful and prolonged, they can kill the planet that hosts them.
Continue reading “Volcanoes are the worst. They’ve caused extinctions on Earth, and probably killed Venus”
We’ve reported in the past about the Venus Life Finder (VLF) mission, which is currently in the proposal stage but could potentially one day explore the Venusian clouds for signs of life. What exactly that life would look like is anyone’s guess. Therefore, the instrumentation the mission will use to find that life will be critical. Enter Fluid-Screen (FS), a technology developed by a start-up company spun out of Yale by Dr. Monika Weber. It could potentially directly detect life in the Venusian atmosphere – if only it could deal with the sulfuric acid.
Continue reading “A Mission to Venus Could Sample its Atmosphere Directly, Searching for Life”
We recently examined how and why Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, could answer the longstanding question: Are we alone? It’s the only moon that possesses a thick atmosphere and the only planetary body other than Earth (so far) that has liquid bodies on its surface. These characteristics alone make Titan an enticing location to search for life beyond Earth. In contrast, what if life were to be found in one of the unlikeliest of places and on a planet that is known to possess some of the harshest conditions ever observed?
Continue reading “Will Venus finally answer, ‘Are we alone?’”
Life on Venus, or the possibility thereof, has been a hot topic as of late. There’s also been plenty of controversies, including the (still disputed) discovery of phosphine, a potential biomarker in the atmosphere. The best way to lay that controversy to rest would be to go there and actually take samples, which at the very least, would help constrain the existence of life in Venus’ cloud layers. And a wide-ranging team from academia and industry hopes to do just that.
Continue reading “What Would it Take to Find Life on Venus?”