In a recent paper accepted by Contemporary Physics, a physicist from Imperial College London makes use of previous missions and recent discoveries to encourage the importance of searching for life in the atmosphere of the most inhospitable planet Venus. This announcement comes as a 2020 announcement said to have discovered the presence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, followed by observations in late 2022 from NASA’s recently retired SOFIA aircraft which 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 a thing odd going on in the atmosphere of Venus.”
“The phosphine detection hasn’t gone away, and there’re additional anomalies perhaps joined by the presence of ammonia,” Clements told Universe Today. “We do not recognize the origin of these anomalies, and much more effort is required, but they’re persisting in spite of appropriately rigorous review. We may additionally be starting to realize why distinct observations have given apparently contradictory results. “
Dr Clements asks what life is, as well as how we can look for it in the universe, but with an emphasis on Venus, pertaining to the next planet from our Sun as “an unlikely candidate for astrobiology” in the papers. He discusses the current and ancient planetary conditions of Venus along with the Venus setting and the alleged detection of phosphine in 2017 by ground telescopes from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array in Chile in 2019 , with follow-up observations by NASA’s SOFIA aircraft in 2021.
This study comes as NASA’s Cassini confirmed the existence of water vapor jets originating from the south pole of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, in the 2000s; NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers presently searching the surface of Mars looking for signs of past life; The NASA is planning to launch its Europa Clipper mission in 2024 to examine the water world of Jupiter, Europa. as well as introducing the Dragonfly expedition to the biggest planet of Saturn, Titan, in 2027. What is the objective of looking for life in the Venus environment, provided all the possible targets for astrobiology?
“Further work is needed before we can add Venus to the list of prime sites for the likelihood of life,” Clements told Universe Today. “That work is being carried out from space as well as from ground missions,” he explained. The fascinating thing is that Venus is a far more convenient target than Europa or Enceladus so missions there’re cheaper and faster.
One future NASA mission specifically designed to study the atmosphere of Venus is the DAVINCI mission, slated to launch in 2029 and turn up on Venus in 2031. DAVINCI is going to study the atmosphere of Venus never before using its suite of instruments. This calls for dropping a titanium probe into the atmosphere, where it is going to take thousands of measurements as it descends to the surface. Because of Venus ‘crushing air pressure and searing heat, scientists do not expect it to survive the landing, but if it does, they want to squeeze nearly 20 minutes of extra science out of it.
” I believe DAVINCI will be really important as it’ll have the ability to offer a lot better’ground truth’ than we presently have, ” Dr. Clements said. “There is also the possibility that several additions to the instrumentation will contribute to its capabilities to search for particular things like phosphine as well as ammonia.”
With a great deal of information from previous observations, together with upcoming missions to Venus, Dr. Clements said that “the phosphine on Venus story remains, more information is coming out of the soil as well as space, and that we still do not find out whether the existence of phosphine is down to life or even some complicated abiotic chemistry that we don’t presently understand.”
