The Plan to Look for Life on Venus—Without NASA
Venus is a nasty planet. Thick layers of high-pressure, sulfuric clouds cover a very hot volcanic surface, which can rise up to as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nevertheless, astrobiologists believe there could be life—or evidence of past life—in those noxious clouds on Earth’s nearest neighbor, 150 million miles away. If so, it might be stranger than any life we’ve ever observed on our own planet.
For all its promise as the place to make first-contact, Venus is a pretty low priority for the two space agencies in the world with the most resources for interplanetary missions: NASA and the European Space Agency. Both agencies have plans to visit Venus. NASA’s Davinci Plus+ probe will measure the composition of Venus’ atmosphere in order to understand how it evolved, and its Veritas mission will map the planet’s rocky surface. The ESA mission, EnVision, is a “holistic” survey of Venus, from clouds to surface.
However, none of these missions will launch until the end of the current decade. And more critically, looking for life isn’t a main goal, just an ancillary one.
Some scientists aren’t willing to wait on NASA and ESA. A team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology astronomer Sara Seager has organized its own privately-backed mission to Venus. If nothing goes wrong, it’s going to blast off next year.
Private citizens and corporations “can ask scientific questions that are not in the mainstream of a government agency,” Janusz Petkowski, an MIT astrobiologist who is on the VLF team, told The Daily Beast.
“NASA and ESA are very slow, especially with life-detection,” Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astronomer at Technical University Berlin who is not associated with the VLF project, told The Daily Beast. “There hasn’t been a single life-detection mission since the 1970s—the Viking landers on Mars—even though technology and also environmental understanding of the neighboring planetary bodies has improved so much.”
The Venus Life Finder project actually involves three separate missions, each of which would fling a probe into the toxic planet’s acidic atmosphere and collect data on the presence, or absence, of something resembling life.
The first mission aims to plunge a probe straight through Venus’s atmosphere at terminal speed. The second mission would deploy a balloon to gently carry instruments through the 40-mile-thick cloud layer, giving them more time to gather data. The third and most ambitious mission would scoop up a sample of those acidic clouds and fly it back to Earth for closer analysis.
All three missions have the same objective: to find evidence that something is metabolizing in or under those clouds. “We designed and performed chemistry and biology experiments to guide mission science objectives related to habitability and the search for life,” the VLF team wrote in a peer-reviewed paper that appeared in the science journal Aerospace on July 18.
To be clear, the two upcoming NASA missions and an ESA mission are also on track to probe Venus’s atmosphere starting around 2028. But those missions “are for general studies about the planet’s properties and do not address the habitability and astrobiology questions,” the VLF team explained.
The first VLF mission is already on the calendar for a May 2023 launch. California-based company Rocket Lab is providing its 12-ton Electron rocket, the spacecraft, and the entry vehicle that—with a two-pound chemical instrument and a radio transmitter aboard—will plummet through the Venusian clouds for up to three minutes before smashing into the volcanic surface.
That first mission’s primary science goal is to search for organic compounds. These compounds wouldn’t prove that life exists on Venus. But they could prove that some strange form of life, made up of those same compounds, might be present on the toxic planet—and that follow-up probes aren’t a waste of time and money. “A discovery of organic compounds would show that complex molecules suitable for life could exist,” the VLF team explained.
The second mission would take its time. Instead of zooming right through Venus’s atmosphere, the second spacecraft—which is still on the drawing board—would deploy a 12-foot-diameter balloon and leisurely drift across the clouds for up to two weeks.
Dangling from the balloon, the probe would split into four mini-probes that would descend on cables to different cloud layers. They’d look for life-supporting metals in the atmosphere, measure acidity and potentially even inspect gas droplets for signs of microbes that might be alive and floating in the planet’s clouds. The latter requires a better microscope than the VLF currently has access to.
The aim of the balloon mission is to “support or refute evidence for signs of life in the Venus cloud layers,” the VLF team wrote. But even positive signs wouldn’t be definitive proof. For that, the team needs an actual sample that contains actual microbes—or remains of them, at least.
So the third and most ambitious VLF probe would skim the top of the Venusian clouds and scoop up a liter of gas and a few grams of cloud particles, before flying away and returning to Earth. “A sample return without a doubt is the most robust way to search for signs of life or life itself in Venus’ atmosphere,” the VLF team explained.
If all this sounds expensive—well, it is. But not by the standards of NASA and ESA, which usually spend half a billion dollars per probe, at a minimum. VLF got its start-up funding—a “few hundred thousand” dollars, according to Seager—from the Breakthrough Initiative, a science incubator largely funded by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner. (The organization is also supporting a wild and perhaps-not-totally-feasible project to send “nanocraft” to a nearby star system to look for alien life.)
The rest of the project’s budget is “in-kind”—scientists and engineers will volunteer their time and effort. Rocket Lab apparently is donating the rocket for the first launch. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
The first probe happens to be the cheapest, and it’s ready to go. The second and third probes still need work. The goal is to get them built and launched before ESA launches its first Venus probe in 2027. (NASA’s missions are scheduled for the period 2028 to 2030.)
It’s okay if the VLF probes don’t end up finding anything living, the VLF team stressed. Venus is strange, and worth studying, even if it’s sterile. “Even if no life is present, current evidence suggests that we have much to learn about this extremely alien world,” the team wrote.
Hopefully, the private Venus mission gathers data that, at the very least, contributes to a better understanding of Earth’s nearest neighbor. In that sense, the VLF project and the future NASA and ESA missions could work together, each probing a different part of Venus in a different way.
“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist with the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute and a VLF team member, told The Daily Beast. “We all wish each other success.”
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