Venus’s Skies Are Covered in Oxygen, Actually
Isaac Schultz
Fri, November 10, 2023 

Venus' cloudy skies.

While air is a gaseous delight unique to Earth, a team of astrophysicists have made a satisfying discovery: the direct observation of atomic oxygen on Venus’ dayside, confirming that the element crucial for our existence exists on both sides of the hellish planet.

About 96% of the atmosphere on the second planet from the Sun is made up of carbon dioxide, a smidge of other gasses including nitrogen, and practically no oxygen. But there is some oxygen, and some of the element was found previously on Venus’ dark side. Now, the same can be said of the world’s scalding sunny side.

Venus wasn’t always so uncomfortable, with an average temperature of 850° Fahrenheit and a toxic atmosphere rich with clouds of sulfuric acid. The planet is sometimes referred to as Earth’s fraternal twin, due to the similarities and obvious differences between the two worlds. Venus may have had oceans once, which evaporated when the planet got stuck in a runaway greenhouse effect (though later research indicated what may have been water oceans were actually lakes of lava).

“Venus is not hospitable, at least for organisms we know from Earth,” Heinz-Wilhelm Hübers, a physicist at the German Aerospace Center and lead author of the study, told Reuters. “We are still at the beginning of understanding the evolution of Venus and why it is so different from Earth.”

In quick succession in Spring 2021, NASA and ESA announced three missions focused on Venus; the United States’ space agency had greenlit VERITAS and DAVINCI+, while the Europeans announced the Venus orbiter EnVision. The VERITAS mission has since been delayed due to funding issues, but space agencies remain committed to better understanding the yellowish world, which could offer insights into Earth’s own evolution over its 4.6-odd billion years of existence.

In other words, we’re setting ourselves up for a whole new portrait of the second planet from the Sun, which will come into focus around 2030.

More: Why Venus Is Soon to Be the Most Exciting Place in the Solar System

Oxygen detected in Venus' hellish atmosphere
Joanna Thompson
Fri, November 10, 2023 

Hemispheric view of Venus.


Venus' atmosphere is notoriously hellish. Its air is corrosive and hot enough to melt lead. Its billowing clouds are poisonous to humans. Sometimes, it rains acid. But researchers just discovered that, sandwiched between layers of toxic gas, this inhospitable atmosphere contains a thin layer of molecular oxygen.

Historically, Venus has received far less scientific attention than Earth's other neighbor, Mars. Recent reports that the organic compound phosphine may (or may not) exist in the Venusian clouds, however, have sparked new interest in studying the planet.

The new measurements come courtesy of NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 that the agency retrofitted with a 2.7-meter (8.9 feet) infrared telescope. A team of German astrophysicists pored through data from SOFIA, focusing on 17 positions in Venus' atmosphere, on both the planet's dayside and nightside. They detected molecular oxygen — a gas composed of nonbonded oxygen atoms — in all of them. The results were published Nov. 7 in the journal Nature Communications.

But that doesn't mean astronauts would be able to breathe oxygen on Venus just as they would on Earth. Molecular oxygen is distinct from the oxygen that we breathe on our planet: Whereas breathable oxygen consists of two bonded oxygen atoms, creating the molecule O2, molecular oxygen is a soup of single, free-floating oxygen atoms. If we tried to breathe it, it would react too easily with the tissues in our lungs and wouldn't make it to our bloodstream.

Oxygen had been previously observed on the nightside of Venus, but this marks the first time researchers have detected it in the day-lit regions as well. The researchers suspect that the molecular oxygen builds up as the sun's heat breaks down carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide molecules. Winds high in the atmosphere then whisk it over to the planet's nightside, where the free oxygen atoms gradually react with other elements.

Surface warmth on a Venus volcano.

RELATED STORIES

—Mysterious flashes on Venus may be a rain of meteors, new study suggests

—Venus has thousands more volcanoes than we thought, and they might be active

—1st evidence of recent volcanic activity on Venus detected in groundbreaking study

The molecular oxygen layer also probably has a slight cooling effect on the upper layers of Venus' atmosphere. This modest cooling isn't enough to offset the planet's runaway greenhouse effect, but it does hint at Venus' milder, more pleasant past.

The finding also highlights how much scientists still have to learn about Earth's hostile "twin." With two upcoming NASA missions, as well as one helmed by the European Space Agency, Venus is about to receive a lot more attention, which may mean more discoveries in the near future.

Between Venus' atmospheric currents, a layer of reactive oxygen

Conor Feehly
Thu, November 9, 2023 

This image of the Venus southern hemisphere illustrates the terminator – the transitional region between the dayside (left) and nightside of the planet (right).

Today, our sister planet Venus resembles an environment as close to hell as one can imagine. Surface temperatures on the amber world soar to 450 degrees Celsius (842 degrees Fahrenheit), while about 96% of the planet's crushing atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide. Once upon a time, however, Venus may have resembled something much closer to our balmy home — Earth.

That was until runaway greenhouse gas processes, likely triggered by volcanic activity, sent Venus on a trajectory that resulted in the noxious neighbor we see today. However, in new research that furthers our understanding of the planet's atmospheric evolution, astronomers announced they've directly detected the presence of atomic oxygen in both the day and night side of the Venusian atmosphere.

Atomic oxygen is the highly reactive chemical cousin of molecular oxygen (the stuff we breathe and simply refer to as oxygen.) Unlike molecular oxygen, or O2, made of oxygen atom pairs, atomic oxygen is composed of individual oxygen atoms.

Related: The deadly atmosphere on Venus could help us find habitable worlds. Here's how

At risk of simplification, those individual oxygen atoms are therefore always ready to pair with another atom or molecule. That's what makes atomic oxygen so reactive — pairing up would make a single oxygen atom more stable, so these oxygen singlets want to react. This is also why molecular oxygen isn't as reactive. Its oxygen atoms are all buddied up.

Detecting atomic oxygen

The team of astronomers led by Heinz-Wilhelm Hübers, director of the German Aerospace Center, used the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) — an airborne observatory, to collect data on Venus' atmosphere.

"We were able to plan a flight route which allowed us to observe Venus (which is at low elevation) shortly before sunset for three days, each day for about 20 minutes," Hübers told Space.com.

Onboard SOFIA was the upGREAT Terahertz heterodyne spectrometer, which was used for the observations. Hübers explained that this particular spectrometer is especially sensitive to the frequency and wavelength of atomic oxygen, which are 4.74 terahertz and 63.2 microns, respectively.

The atmosphere on Venus houses two strong currents. The lower of the two sits below 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) in altitude, where the equivalent of hurricane-force winds on Earth blow against the direction of Venus' rotation. The higher current sits above 120 kilometers (74.6 miles) in altitude with winds that flow in the direction of the planet's rotation.

"A layer of atomic oxygen exists between these two opposing atmospheric currents," Hübers says.

This layer of atomic oxygen, the scientists believe, is produced by ultraviolet radiation coming from the sun, which breaks down carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in Venus' atmosphere into atomic oxygen and other molecules. In this process, known as photolysis, high-energy photons collide with carbon molecules to force the molecules to essentially rip apart.

Because the atomic oxygen is predominantly concentrated around 100 kilometers (62 miles) in altitude between the two circulation patterns, it's possible these currents play a role in distributing the substance around the planet. However, Hübers says the team couldn't quite quantify this yet with their current measurements.

Although, he does mention they observed a local enhancement of atomic oxygen on the planet's nightside, close to the line which separates day and night, known as the "terminator." Possibly, this enhancement could be caused by the terminator's winds.
Should future missions to Venus be worried?

While atomic oxygen was detected in Venus' atmosphere, it's worth noting that the concentration was much lower than what we find in Earth's atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere has roughly 10 times more atomic oxygen than Venus' does. In fact, the relatively high concentration of atomic oxygen in the atmosphere around our planet is considered a threat — these particles are responsible for some corrosion of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), including the International Space Station.

The presence of the highly reactive oxygen on Venus, therefore, shouldn't pose too much of a corrosive threat to any future satellites that get sent there.

"Besides that, it is very interesting to measure the altitude distribution of the atomic oxygen in the Venusian atmosphere in order to understand the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere better and to compare it with Earth," says Hübers.
Atomic oxygen, day and night

Related Stories:

— Planet Venus: 20 interesting facts about the scorching world

— Life on Venus? Intriguing molecule phosphine spotted in planet's clouds again

— 'Lightning' on Venus is actually meteors burning up in planet's atmosphere, study says

It was important for researchers to collect data from both the day and night side of Venus, largely because the planet rotates at an excruciatingly slow pace — one day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days, or 5,832 hours.

According to Hübers, the most likely explanation for this slow rotation is that the gravity of the sun induced tides on Venus during an early stage of the planet's lifecycle, when it was more or less a liquid, molten body. The rotational energy of Venus possibly worked against the formation of tides on the world due to that molten structure, and eventually, scientists think it slowed to its current-day rotational speed.

Ultimately, the results from the study paint a picture of the Venusian atmosphere as starkly different to our own, and highlight how small differences in our past can accumulate over time to result in dramatically different futures.

The study was published Tuesday (Nov. 7) in the journal Nature Communications.

SEE 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for VENUS 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for VELIKOVSKY 

 

Rocket Lab to conduct first private mission to Venus

BY MARK R. WHITTINGTON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 09/11/22 10:00 AM ET
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Institute of Space and Astronautical Science

One benefit of the commercial space launch revolution has been the lower cost of planetary missions. Launch systems such as the SpaceX Falcon 9 have enabled public-private partnerships such as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program in which NASA has partnered with small businesses to launch probes to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis moon-exploration program. The costs of these missions are a fraction of the past NASA-only missions.

Now, Rocket Lab, a launch company that is rapidly becoming a competitor to SpaceX, is taking cheap robotic space exploration one step further. The joint American-New Zealand company is sending a probe to search for life in the upper atmosphere of Venus, the second planet from the sun.

Venus would seem to be a strange target for a search for extraterrestrial life. Its surface is a hell of crushing CO2 and sulfuric acid with an atmospheric pressure 90 times that of the Earth’s surface and a temperature of roughly 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists believe that Venus was once a world much like Earth but, because of natural processes, underwent a runaway greenhouse effect that made the planet what it is today.

On Venus, 50 kilometers above the hellish surface, above the sulfuric acid clouds, the planet is a relatively benign place. The temperature and atmospheric pressure are very close to Earth normal.

Recently, scientists thought they had detected phosphine in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Phosphine is a gas that is only created in nature by microbes. The discovery sparked speculation that microbes trapped in droplets of water are floating 50 kilometers above the surface of Venus.

Other scientists have since disputed the discovery. Nevertheless, Rocket Lab is sending a privately financed probe that will dip into the Venusian atmosphere to find out for sure. The probe, called the Venus Life Finder (VLF), would be launched on a Rocket Lab Electron, according to Ars Technica, in May 2023. The Electron’s Photon upper stage would raise the VLF probe’s orbit until it achieves escape velocity. Some months later, in October 2023, the VLF would plunge into Venus’ atmosphere and spend three minutes looking for life.

The VLF represents the second development that promises to revolutionize planetary exploration. The probe, developed by scientists at MIT, weighs just 50 pounds. When it plunges into Venus’ atmosphere it will use an instrument called the “autofluorescing nephelometer” that will use a laser to illuminate organic molecules that may or may not exist 50 kilometers above the planet’s surface.

If the VLF probe finds signs of life in the upper atmosphere of Venus, the discovery will be a historic event. Scientists have been trying to find microbial life on Mars for decades. Extraterrestrial life may reside in warm oceans beneath the ice layers of Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Venus might be the last place that anyone expected to find the first lifeform to have evolved on — or above — another world.

Even if the VLF does not find life in the upper atmosphere of Venus, just putting the probe where it needs to be to look for it will open all sorts of possibilities for Rocket Lab and any other company that cares to take advantage of them. Tiny, light-weight robotic probes combined with cheap launch systems could usher in a new era of solar system exploration.

Even when the launch system is monstrously expensive, tiny space probes can take advantage of ridesharing opportunities. The Artemis 1 mission, currently stuck on the launch pad, contains 10 such cube satellite probes, called “CubeSats,” that will be deployed along with the uncrewed Orion spacecraft once the expensive and complex Space Launch System gets off the ground.

The CLPS program is another example of small, privately developed space probes using modern, inexpensive launch vehicles, in this case to explore the lunar surface in advance of the first Artemis missions. The Intuitive Machines Nova-C and the Astrobotic Peregrine are due to launch to the moon in December 2022. NASA is partly financing these missions.

Rocket Lab, which has already launched numerous satellites to low-Earth orbit, has also boosted the CAPSTONE CubeSat to a lunar orbit. However, the success or failure of the Venus Life Finder mission will likely determine that company’s role in exploring the solar system.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of space exploration studies “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.

A PRIVATE MISSION WANTS TO FIND ALIEN LIFE ON THE SOLAR SYSTEM'S MOST UNRELENTING PLANET

The Venus Life Finder mission wants to find microbes on the place they shouldn't be able to survive.

Photo 12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

JEFF NAGLE
12 HOURS AGO

THE LAST MISSION to enter the mysterious cloud layers of Earth’s superheated twin Venus was long enough ago that it was launched by the Soviet Union, a country that no longer exists. Vega 2 spent two days floating through the clouds in the summer of 1985, and its lander survived for 56 minutes on the unrelentingly hostile surface.

Since then, missions to Venus have remained in the comparative safety of orbit. The last American mission to visit Venus itself was the Magellan, which visited in 1989 and hung out until 1994. But that will soon change.

While NASA has plans for VERITAS and DAVINCI+ to orbit Venus and for the latter to drop a probe into its cloud layers, a privately-funded mission to Venus could chase a controversial 2020 discovery indicating microbial life in the upper cloud layers of Venus.

The Venus Life Finder Mission team, based at MIT, wants to send a small, single-instrument probe to descend through the clouds that permanently huddle over Earth’s nearest neighbor next May, according to the team’s latest mission summary.

WHAT’S NEW — Venus Life Finder team proposes three increasingly complex missions, with the first already prepared in collaboration with Rocket Lab. (Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck spoke with Inverse about his interest in the planet in 2021.)

The “small mission,” as the team refers to it, involves sending an instrument known as an autofluorescence nephelometer (really rolls off the tongue) plummeting through Venus’ three layers of clouds to look at the makeup of the clouds. The instrument will shine an ultraviolet laser into Venus’ atmosphere and watch it pass over the particles that fly by.


Artist’s rendering of the Venus Life Finder fleet and what it might look for Venus Life Finder team

According to Janusz Petkowski, an astrobiology researcher at MIT and deputy PI on Venus Life Finder, “many atmospheric anomalies have accumulated over decades from the time of Pioneer-Venus and Venera from the Soviets,” from the presence of ammonia and oxygen, to non-spherical particles in the clouds that might be salts, to the controversial presence of phosphine first announced in 2020. Venus Life Finder’s mission would mark the first direct observations of the cloud layer in nearly four decades.

Petkowski says Venus Life Finder will give scientists a chance to determine which of those anomalies are actually present in Venus’ atmosphere — or “maybe even discover some new anomalies in the process.”

MIT astrophysicist and Venus Life Finder principal investigator Sara Seager tells Inverse, “if there’s ringed carbon molecules they’re very easy to fluoresce. And that would be really a big breakthrough. It doesn’t tell us if there’s life there, but if there’s organic molecules it means there’s organic chemistry, and that would definitely be a step in the right direction.”

The tight focus of this mission means that the question of phosphine, which drew the team together during the pandemic, will have to wait for subsequent missions. Current plans call for a medium and a large follow-up to the nephelometer. A medium mission would involve floating a balloon through the harsh clouds for several days.

The more ambitious large mission would involve returning a Venusian sample to Earth. These missions have a much longer timescale, and rely on other parts of the community to solve critical engineering problems – like NASA’s Mars Sample Return, scheduled to collect Perseverance’s samples sometime after 2028.


A panorama of images from Venera 13.Russian Academy of Sciences / Ted Stryk

WHY IT MATTERS — Since the last time probes visited Venus’ atmosphere, Seager says, “there’s this quiet revolution happening about thinking about Venus as a habitable environment.”

“Most of our life's biochemicals can’t survive in it, it was kind of the accepted wisdom that it was sterile,” she adds.

But laboratory experiments have begun to demonstrate that even an environment made up of sulfuric acid is not necessarily anathema to complex organic chemistry, or even life.

“Our organic chemistry might not be able to survive it, but that doesn’t mean that all organic chemistry is impossible,” Petkowski say. Finding organic molecules in Venus’ clouds would be the first step toward determining if there’s a rich hydrocarbon chemistry within the clouds.

Additionally, some of the anomalies observed by previous Venus missions point to the potential for much more habitable spots within a planet that is still hostile to life. The presence of ammonia would mean that “the clouds are not exactly what we think they are,” Petkowski adds, and that while Venus overall is extremely dry, local measurements from Pioneer and the Soviet Venera probes indicate that there may be local patches where there are anomalously high amounts of water. “Venus’ clouds are a Pandora’s box — each time we dive into the old data collected by the Americans and the Russians we discover there is much more to the clouds than we actually thought and they are much more mysterious than we previously thought.”

WHAT’S NEXT — NASA and the European Space Agency each have missions planned for the end of the decade. But if it launches on schedule in May of 2023, Venus Life Finder would be the first privately-funded scientific mission to another planet. “This is kind of the opposite approach,” notes Seager. The mission would launch aboard a Rocket Lab vehicle, marking that company’s first interplanetary mission.

Compared to these larger, multi-mission probes, VLF’s first mission has only one instrument, and one focus as a project: determining if there is organic chemistry in Venus’ clouds. “Instead of waiting 10 years or 40 years to go back to the atmosphere of Venus, we’re trying to do things that are focused–but still very expensive–missions that can answer questions sooner,” Seager says.

The team hopes that Venus Life Finder’s small first mission will inspire a new focus on Venus’ present, not just its past. Notes Seager, “The search for life on Venus is taboo, still kind of crazy, and despite people having thought of this half a century ago starting with Carl Sagan, it’s kind of out there. And so there’s a real niche for small focused privately funded missions to fill because there could be something big there, but if people are too conservative to search for it, it leaves an opening for a new way of doing things.”

Why Venus is now a slim crescent and will disappear from the evening sky this weekend

Jamie Carter
Fri, August 11, 2023

Venus as a razor-thin crescent as it nears inferior conjunction with the sun.

You may have noticed in recent weeks that the planet Venus has slipped from the post-sunset sky, slimming into a crescent shape as it drops from view. Its reign as the bright "Evening Star" in 2023 is over, as a relatively rare celestial phenomenon takes shape.

On Aug. 13, Venus will appear to be between Earth and the sun, which astronomers describe as being at inferior conjunction. It's purely a line-of-sight phenomenon, and from Earth's point of view it can only happen to two planets in the solar system — Mercury and Venus — both of which are inferior planets, which means they are closer to the sun than Earth. The outer planets, which lie farther from the sun than Earth, are called superior planets by astronomers.

Another way of understanding Venus at inferior conjunction is to think of it as in its "new" phase, much as a new moon sits between Earth and the sun. Just like a new moon, Venus at inferior conjunction will be virtually invisible to us on Earth. On Aug. 13, the planet will be completely lost in the sun's glare and impossible to observe. This phenomenon happens once every 19 months, according to EarthSky, because Venus' orbit around the sun takes just 225 days (compared with Earth's 365).

As Venus has been approaching inferior conjunction, it's been thinning to a slim crescent, just as the moon becomes a waning crescent on its way to becoming a new moon. Appearing closer to the sun with each passing day, Venus has been sinking lower to the horizon in the post-sunset western sky. As well as losing latitude, it's also been losing light. As the angle between it and the sun has been reducing, on Earth we've been able to see less and less sunlight reflected from Venus.

Venus won't appear to cross the sun's disk on Aug. 13, instead passing just 7.7 degrees to its south and be just 0.9% illuminated, according to BBC Sky At Night magazine. The moment when the planet appears to pass across the disk of the sun as seen from Earth is called a transit of Venus, which last happened on June 5 to 6, 2012. A transit won't happen again until Dec. 10 to 11, 2117.

— The 'man in the moon' may be hundreds of millions of years older than we thought

Venus' trip into the sun's glare will be brief. Venus and Earth are in an 8:13 resonance, so from Earth's point of view, Venus orbits the sun 13 times in every eight Earth years, according to The Planetary Society. A week or two after its inferior conjunction, Venus will have moved sufficiently away from the sun's glare to emerge into the dawn sky and begin its appearance as the "Morning Star". It will reach its highest point in the sky on Oct. 23 as it appears 46.4 degrees west of the sun, according to Astro Pixels. That farthest point from the sun is called its greatest elongation west.

Venus reached superior conjunction (appearing to go behind the sun) on June 4, 2024, achieving its greatest elongation east in the post-sunset sky on Jan. 10, 2025, according to Timeanddate.com.

If you're looking to photograph Venus, the upcoming Perseid meteor shower or the night sky in general, don't miss our guide on how to photograph meteor showers, as well as our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.

This story was provided by Livescience.

THE MORNING STAR IS THE EVENING STAR

Instruments for NASA's VERITAS Venus mission get a test in Iceland (photos)

Stefanie Waldek
Fri, August 11, 2023 

a drone alights on the hand of a man standing in the middle of a black lava field with mountains in the background


NASA's VERITAS Venus mission might be on hold, but team members continue to test out its gear here on Earth.

The German Aerospace Center (known by the German acronym DLR), a VERITAS mission partner, is conducting field tests in Iceland this summer, using its airborne F-SAR radar sensor and an infrared imager called V-EMulator to study lava flows. As Venus is expected to have a volcanic surface, the volcanic landscapes of Iceland serve as a strong analog for what VERITAS might find on our neighboring planet.

"Characterizing and measuring the extent and type of volcanic and tectonic processes on Venus is key to understanding the evolution of the surface of Venus and rocky planets in general," Sue Smrekar, the principal investigator for VERITAS at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement.

Related: Here's every successful Venus mission humanity has ever launched

two people stand on a black lava field with a white insrument on a black tripod

During two weeks of field operations, scientists and researchers from DLR and JPL will use the F-SAR radar system mounted on DLR's Dornier 228-212 aircraft to collect imaging data from Iceland's surface. Simultaneously, teams are collecting data and samples on the ground for laboratory analysis to supplement the radar data.

DLR is also testing V-EMulator, a prototype for the eventual Venus Emissivity Mapper that will be installed on VERITAS (whose name is short for "Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography And Spectroscopy").

"This will be of tremendous help to us in characterizing the mineralogical composition and origin of the major geologic terrains on the Venusian surface when VEM delivers 'true' Venus data during the mission phase," Solmaz Adeli, of DLR's Institute of Planetary Research, said in the same statement.

radar image of a lava field, featuring greenish patches of fresher lava against a dark background of older deposits.

RELATED STORIES:

— Problems with NASA asteroid mission Psyche delay Venus probe's launch to 2031

— NASA Venus mission VERITAS becomes collateral damage amid budget pressures

— Venus may have supported life billions of years ago

NASA intended VERITAS to launch in 2027, but due to institutional troubles at JPL, among other issues, the mission has been delayed indefinitely. It is expected that VERITAS might launch in the early 2030s, though mission funding has been reduced and further delays might occur.

The agency is also developing another Venus mission, called DAVINCI ("Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging"), which is scheduled to reach the planet in the early 2030s. Europe's EnVision probe, another Venus effort, is expected to get off the ground in that same general time frame as well.

As these three missions show, scientific interest in the second planet from the sun has surged over the past few years. Researchers increasingly view Venus as a possible abode for life, both in the ancient past and in the present day. Life as we know it cannot exist on the planet's scorching-hot surface today, but conditions about 30 miles (50 kilometers) up in the clouds are much more Earth-like.

SPACE RACE 3.0


Venus Wins Stunning Third New Mission, This Time from Europe

EnVision will follow NASA’s DAVINCI+ and VERITAS

By Meghan Bartels, SPACE.com on June 12, 2021

An artist's depiction of Earth, Venus and ESA's EnVision spacecraft. 

Credit: European Space Agency, Paris Observatory and VR2Planets

Venus scientists have long complained that the planet wasn’t getting its due in robotic investigators. But those days are over: space agencies have announced three new missions to Earth’s mysterious twin in just over a week.

On June 2, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency would pursue two new Venus missions dubbed DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, aiming to launch the spacecraft between 2028 and 2030. Today (June 10), the European Space Agency (ESA) joined the rush to Venus, announcing that it would launch a mission dubbed EnVision to the planet in the early 2030s.

“A new era in the exploration of our closest, yet wildly different, Solar System neighbour awaits us,” Günther Hasinger, ESA’s director of science, said in a statement. “Together with the newly announced NASA-led Venus missions, we will have an extremely comprehensive science programme at this enigmatic planet well into the next decade.”

The mission was chosen over an astrophysics project called Theseus, which would have studied very distant gamma-ray bursts and other transient events, with the goal of understanding the life cycle of the very first stars, according to ESA.

The new mission won’t be Europe’s first visit to our neighboring world: ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft orbited the world from 2005 to 2014, studying the planet’s thick atmosphere, which is rich in carbon dioxide.

EnVision will also orbit Venus, but its instruments will be able to get a deeper look at the planet than those onboard Venus Express did. The spacecraft’s tools will include a sounder to investigate layers within the planet, spectrometers to analyze gases in Venus’ atmosphere and compounds on its surface, a radar instrument to map the planet’s surface, and a radio science experiment that will probe the planet’s structure and gravity field, according to ESA.

Although the project is led by ESA, the spacecraft’s radar instrument will come from NASA. “EnVision’s VenSAR will provide a unique perspective with its targeted studies of the Venus surface, enriching the roadmap of Venus exploration,” Adriana Ocampo, EnVision program scientist at NASA, said in a NASA statement.

Meanwhile, NASA’s VERITAS mission (short for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy) will generate a global map of the topography of Venus. The data will be a vital upgrade compared to what we have from NASA’s Magellan mission, which used a much older version of the technology to map Venus between 1989 and 1994.

DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging) will be the only one of these new missions to venture through Venus’ atmosphere. The spacecraft includes a main orbiter plus a probe that will travel all the way down through the planet’s atmosphere to its surface, gathering measurements of how the atmosphere changes with depth.

EnVision will launch after the two NASA projects, with ESA officials evaluating Ariane 6 launch windows in 2031, 2032 and 2033. The spacecraft will then take 15 months to reach Venus and another 16 months to reach its final orbit.

Taken together, the three new missions will be a powerful tool for scientists looking to better understand how Earth and Venus started out so similar but became such different worlds, Tom Wagner, NASA’s Discovery Program scientist, said in the NASA statement.

“The combined results of EnVision and our Discovery missions will tell us how the forces of volcanism, tectonics and chemical weathering joined together to create and sustain Venus’ runaway hothouse climate.”

Copyright 2021 Space.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Meghan Bartels is a science journalist based in New York City.

SPACE
NASA Just Broke the 'Venus Curse': Here's What It Took

June 2, 2021 — Robin George Andrews

SPACE
NASA Picks Two Missions to Explore Venus, the First in Decades

June 3, 2021 — Robin George Andrews

 Quirks & Quarks·Analysis

Europe and NASA to send three new spacecraft to Venus

Three missions will be heading to our nearest neighbour to study its atmosphere and geology

Bob McDonald · CBC Radio · Posted: Jun 11, 2021 

The European Space Agency's EnVision mission and NASA's VERITAS and DAVINCI+ missions will explore Venus' geology and atmosphere. (NASA/JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Damia Bouic/VR2Planets)

The European Space Agency has announced it will be launching its own mission to Venus that will join two American spacecraft announced earlier this month, to explore our sister planet. It is part of a broad effort to solve the mystery of why a world so much like ours turned out so differently.

The European mission, called EnVision, will orbit Venus and probe the surface with radar, looking for signs of volcanic activity both past and present. Volcanoes are believed to be the source of a planet's atmosphere and the atmosphere of Venus is incredibly different from ours and that of Mars.  

If you have felt the intense heat when you open the door of an oven that has been baking at 200 C, that would be considered a cold day on Venus. The temperature on the surface is more than twice that, an unimaginable 464 C — higher than the melting point of lead.

This image made available by NASA shows Venus with data from the Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter. On Wednesday, June 2, 2021, NASA’s new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced two new robotic missions to the solar system's hottest planet, during his first major address to employees. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/The Associated Press)

Any spacecraft we send there has little chance of surviving for long. The only craft to land on Venus were the Russian Venera series. In fact, Venera 3 was the first spacecraft to touch another planet in 1966. However, it was a crash landing, as the spacecraft failed in the atmosphere. 

Several following missions were lost due to the harsh conditions, and even those that landed successfully didn't last for long. Venera 9 operated for a full 53 minutes, but in that time was able to successfully send back the first image of Venus's surface. The Venera 13 mission survived for just a bit over two hours. In 1978, the U.S. sent its Pioneer Venus missions, and while one of the atmospheric probes survived to reach the surface, it succumbed after 45 minutes.

This panorama image, taken by the Venera 13 spacecraft on March 1, 1982, is one of the few images ever taken on the surface of Venus, Earth's nearest neighbour. The planet's thick clouds make its surface impossible for an orbiter to see. (NASA History Office)

Given the conditions, it's highly unlikely a human will ever set foot on Venus.

We have three planets in our solar system, Venus, Earth and Mars, all made of similar rocky materials, all within the habitable zone of the sun, but with three very different environments. One is a super-hot runaway greenhouse, enshrouded in a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. One is in a permanent ice age with frigid temperatures under an extremely thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, and the other, right in the middle, is just right with nitrogen and oxygen air to breathe and live in.

The intriguing part of this mystery of why the planets are so different is the fact that at one time in the distant past, they were much more alike. There is evidence that billions of years ago Venus was cooler with liquid water on its surface and we're pretty sure that Mars was warmer and wetter as well. That means there could have been a time long, long ago when there were three blue planets.

This radar map from the Magellan spacecraft's visit to Venus in 1990 shows a Venusian mountain and lava fields. Conditions on the planet are incredibly hostile today, but a billion years ago might have been quite pleasant. (NASA)

The reason we explore other planets is to better understand our own. Venus and Mars changed from conditions that might have supported life to dramatically different environments and have remained that way ever since. The Earth on the other hand, is in a constant state of change, with ice ages and warm periods battling for dominance over geological time. 

It's clear that planets are capable of dramatic global transformations. In the past, those changes have been the result of volcanic activity, impact of objects from space or the movement of continents. Now we humans are affecting the climate on a global scale in a very short time, pushing a system that has the ability to transform profoundly. Nobody is suggesting that the Earth is in danger of turning into something like Venus or Mars. But they are a vivid illustration of what can happen to a planet when its climate goes awry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob McDonald

Bob McDonald is the host of CBC Radio's award-winning weekly science program, Quirks & Quarks. He is also a science commentator for CBC News Network and CBC-TV's The National. He has received 12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada

Life on Venus? MIT study says Venusian clouds may have habitable pockets

“We do not know what kind or type of life we will find. If there is life we do expect it to be simple single-celled life forms," says Dr. Sara Seager

The corresponding author of the study Dr Sara Seager, from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains in an email to indianexpress.com: “We do not know what kind or type of life we will find. If there is some life we do expect it to be simple single-celled life forms…Life may have originated on Venus as it did on Earth, assuming that Venus had water oceans early on. As Venus heated up and lost its oceans, life would have had to migrate to and evolve to live in the clouds.”

She adds that we need targeted missions to search for signs of life and life itself. “We need missions that drop probes or balloons in the Venus atmosphere directly to study the cloud particles as if there is life it likely resides inside the cloud droplets,” Dr Seager says.

The team is currently working on a privately-funded focused mission to Venus with a targeted launch date of 2023 as well as MIT’s Venus Life Finder missions which aim to study Venus’ cloud particles and continue where the previous missions from nearly four decades ago left off.

A 238-YEAR-OLD INVENTION COULD HELP US SURVIVE VENUS' HELLISH ATMOSPHERE

According to multiple lines of evidence, Venus was once a much different planet than it is today.

MATT WILLIAMS
12.31.2021 

ACCORDING TO multiple lines of evidence, Venus was once a much different planet than it is today. But roughly 500 million years ago, a massive resurfacing event triggered a runaway greenhouse effect that led to the hot, poisonous, and hellish environment we see there today. Therefore, the study of Venus presents an opportunity to model the evolution of planetary environments, which can serve as a reference for what could happen in the future.

In the coming years, NASA plans to send lighter-than-air missions to Venus to explore the atmosphere above the cloud tops, where temperatures are stable and atmospheric pressure is comparable to that of Earth. With support from NASA, engineers at West Virginia University (WVU) are developing software that will enable balloon-based aerial robots (aerobots) to survey Venus’ atmosphere in small fleets. (The first hot air balloon flight took place in 1783.)

The research is led by Guilherme Pereira and Yu Gu, two associate professors with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at WVU. They were joined by Bernardo Martinez Rocamora Jr., Chizhao Yang, and Anna Puigvert i Juan, two doctoral students in aerospace and mechanical engineering and a master’s student in mechanical engineering (respectively). Their research is supported by a $100,000 grant from NASA’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

EXPLORING THE CLOUD TOPS OF VENUS

Part of what makes Venus fascinating to scientists is its similarities with Earth. In fact, Venus is colloquially known as Earth’s “Sister Planet” because it is also a rocky body composed primarily of silicate minerals and metals differentiated into a metallic core and a silicate mantle and crust. Venus’ atmosphere, however, is a much different story. In addition to being hot enough to melt lead — with an average temperature of 464 °C (867 °F) — and an atmosphere that’s over 90 times as dense as Earth’s.

But at an altitude of 50-70 km (30-45 mi) above the surface, the temperature and pressure of Venus’ atmosphere are similar to that of Earth. This presents opportunities for atmospheric research using lighter-than-air vehicles. Proposals include NASA’s High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC), a series of concepts for a 30-day crewed mission that would explore Venus’s upper atmosphere using large lighter-than-air craft.

While this project is no longer active, it inspired subsequent proposals, like the Venus Atmosphere Maneuverable Platform (VAMP), a hybrid airship under development by NASA and its commercial partner, Northrop Grumman. These concepts rely on buoyancy and aerodynamic life to control their altitude, allowing them to fly like a plane during the daytime (using solar energy to power their batteries) and float at night to save energy.

Until now, though, no efforts have been mounted to create software that would allow these craft to act autonomously. As Prof. Pereira explained in a recent WVU Today press release:
“The main goal of the project is to propose a software solution that will allow hybrid aerobots to explore the atmosphere of Venus. Although hybrid vehicles were proposed before this project, we are not aware if any software has been created. One of the ideas of our project is to extend the battery life of the vehicle by planning energy-efficient paths, thus allowing it to fly during the night as well.”

NAVIGATING VENUS’ ATMOSPHERE

The software suite Pereira and Gu are currently working on will have three main goals: Optimize travel routes, localize the aerobots in Venus’ atmosphere, and coordinate fleets of aerobots to work together. The first goal involves the creation of a “motion planer” that will run on the aerobot’s computers and allow for optimized travel. As the NASA science team commands the aerobots to travel from one position to another, the software will select routes that minimize the amount of energy used and take advantage of the local winds.

“The motion planner will be created by understanding the dynamics of the aerobot, the properties of its solar panels and batteries and the properties of Venus atmosphere,” said Pereira. With the dynamics of the vehicle, the planner will only consider movements that are feasible given certain inputs to the aircraft, such as thrust coming from the propellers or deflections of the control surfaces.”

To this end, the software must account for the interoperability of the craft’s solar panels, batteries, and solar intensity. This will allow it to determine how much charge the vehicle needs to power its systems and what the recharging rate will be like. With these models, Pereira explained, the motion planner will calculate the most energy-efficient routes for the aerobot to take:
“The understanding of the atmosphere provides the robots quantities like wind direction and magnitude, pressure, temperature and solar intensity. We are trying to come up with an optimal energy strategy. This is important since the vehicle will be orbiting the atmosphere of Venus in around four days. It will be exposed to long periods without light on the dark side of the planet and it needs to have enough energy to survive these periods.”

The motion planner will also compare information on the position of the aerobot, its desired goal location, and information about the atmospheric conditions between these two positions. If, for example, the wind is blowing in the same direction as the aerobot’s path to its destination, it will select this route over another that would present wind resistance.

“Starting from the initial position, the planner will simulate different movements the aerobot could make and associate costs for each of them depending on the quantities mentioned before,” Pereira added. “After that, the motion planner will keep propagating the movements of the aerobot with a smaller cost, creating a tree of possibilities until we reach our destination.”

The second goal, localizing the aerobots in Venus’ atmosphere, is more complicated. Currently, there are no GPS satellites in orbit around Venus, making localization difficult. As such, Pereira and Gu are designing their software suite to be able to use information from other vehicles and maps of the planet. This will allow several aerobots to keep track of their positions as they navigate the cloud tops of Venus.

The third goal is to coordinate the vehicles to provide improved localization so they can better estimate Venus’s atmospheric conditions. To this end, Pereira and Gu relied on wind models of Venus’ atmosphere created by NASA from data obtained by missions like the Pioneer Venus missions, Cassini–Huygens, MESSENGER, and the ESA’s Venus Express. They also plan to equip each aerobot with wind sensors to estimate local wind speed and direction.

By sharing data from multiple locations, said Pereira, a fleet of aerobots will have a better idea of the overall wind patterns and their spatial distribution in the atmosphere:
“The importance of the wind flow is related to the fact that it can be exploited to take the aerobot to desired locations. Just as with sprinters in the Olympics when they get better marks if they are experiencing tail-wind. If the wind is directed towards the goal of the aircraft, the aerobot movement will be aided by the wind and, by consequence, the path will be more energetically efficient.”

Looking ahead, Pereira and Gu plan to develop a Venus atmosphere simulator to evaluate their software and the aerobots’ functionality. “Several exploratory missions to Venus collected data of wind, temperature, pressure, and air density,” Pereira said. “This information was then used to create a simulator where, given the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the vehicle, we compute all the forces acting on the vehicle.”

Pereira and Gu estimate that the vehicle’s buoyancy will prevent it from descending below an altitude of 50 km (31 mi) and will have a lifespan (at cruise altitude) of several months to a year. The data obtained by this and other missions to Venus are expected to shed light on the evolution of the planet’s atmosphere, the possibility that Venus is still volcanically active, and provide clues for dealing with the greenhouse effect here on Earth.

This article was originally published on Universe Today by Matt Williams. Read the original article here.

MISSION MORNINGSTAR

NASA selects 2 Venus missions to explore Earth’s ‘hellish’ neighbor

By Eliza Fawcett, Hartford Courant
Published: June 7, 2021

For decades, scientists who study Earth’s neighbor Venus have watched with dismay as NASA sends mission after mission to Mars.

The last time the United States visited Venus was in 1989, when it sent the spacecraft Magellan to map the topography of the “hellish” planet. Although Venus is roughly the size of Earth, the planet is fundamentally different, encased in a dense, toxic atmosphere of carbon dioxide. The air pressure on Venus’ surface is equivalent to the pressure experienced a mile beneath Earth’s oceans.

Now, a Wesleyan professor is playing a key role in two newly-announced NASA missions to Venus.

“The question has always been, if you have two Earth-sized planets right next to each other, and one of them is habitable and teeming with life, and the other is not, what happened?” said Dr. Martha S. Gilmore, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown.

At long last, the moment to answer that question has come. Last week, NASA selected two Venus missions, both of which Gilmore helped develop, for its Discovery Program. Each project will receive about $500 million from NASA for development. The missions are expected to launch by 2028 to 2030.

One mission, VERITAS, will send an orbiter to Venus to create high-resolution imaging of the planet’s surface and gather data on the composition of its rocky topography. The other mission, DAVINCI+, will drop an atmospheric probe through Venus’ harsh atmosphere to measure its chemical composition.

“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a speech last week. “They will offer the entire science community the chance to investigate a planet we haven’t been to in more than 30 years.”

NASA’s selection was a thrilling victory for Gilmore and other scientists in the small, insular research community that studies Venus. For years, researchers have submitted proposals to return to the planet, only to see them passed over in favor of other projects. In 2017, both Venus missions were in contention for NASA funding but lost out to two asteroid missions.

It’s different this time around.

“The relief we feel, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, finally!’” Gilmore said.

‘Other Earths’

Gilmore has been enamored of Venus since she was a doctoral student at Brown University, back when the Magellan mission was deployed. Although she has also studied Mars extensively over the course of her career, she has always been drawn to Venus, partly because the planet may hold the key to understanding what she calls “the basic building blocks of planets.”

“As we look out there, we want to find other Earths. We want to look at Earth-sized planets,” Gilmore said. “And so what better way to do that than to study an Earth-sized planet that we have access to, which is Venus?”

ANOTHER SOVIET FIRST

The Soviet space program began exploring Venus in the early 1960s and eventually landed spacecraft on the planet’s surface that took images of its rugged, rocky terrain — before getting crushed under the intense heat and pressure. Magellan spent four years in Venus’ orbit and mapped the planet’s surface, returning images that, at the resolution of a football field, showed that it was covered in ancient lava flows, indicating a history of volcanic activity.

Over the last decade, Gilmore said, scientific research has shown evidence for active volcanism on Venus, and new models have indicated that the planet’s climate may have been habitable for billions of years. The two new missions will provide the most extensive opportunity in years to explore the many unanswered questions about Venus — and our solar system.

For instance: Why do some planets become habitable while others don’t? Where does water come from? Do planets have an initial supply of water, or does it arrive from comets or meteorites?

“The imaging that DAVINCI+ will do and then mapping that VERITAS will do will let us look at landforms. That’s how we identified water on Mars: We can see sedimentary rocks; we can look for river channels and morphology,” Gilmore said.

In addition to obtaining high-resolution images of Venus’ surface, VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy), the orbiter, will conduct a spectroscopy to determine the composition of the planet’s rocks, enabling scientists to study how the rocks were formed. Gilmore specializes in studying the oldest rocks on Venus, and her research suggests that those rocks are “compositionally different than the younger lava flows and different in a way that suggests they were formed in the presence of water.”

As it falls toward Venus’s surface, DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) will have just 62 minutes to collect data and measure the atmosphere’s chemical composition. The probe is not designed to withstand the impact of landing.

On the DAVINCI+ mission, Gilmore has worked to fit the probe with a camera that will return high-resolution images of “tesserae,” unique geological features on Venus which may be similar to the Earth’s continents.

“As we go down over these old terrains, we can get images of them at the centimeter scale, to understand what those rocks are,” she said. “Are they sediments? Are there channels down there? We don’t know.”
Preparing for the launch

The two Venus missions are still seven to nine years away from being launched. In the coming years, Gilmore and other scientists will work with engineers to refine the mission designs. Gilmore is also conducting experiments on rocks that will eventually help her interpret the data the missions generate.

The real work begins once the missions are complete and a fresh trove of data is available for analysis — a task that Gilmore’s undergraduate and graduate students will be able to assist on.

“That’ll probably take me through the rest of my career,” she said.

For now, Gilmore said she’s proud of the work the Venus community has done to get to this point. And she’s eagerly anticipating the work to come.

“I’m still shocked,” she said. “But I’m thrilled.”

NASA eyes return to inhospitable Venus

By MARCIA DUNN, Associated Press
Published: June 3, 2021

This image shows the planet Venus made with data from the Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter. On Wednesday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced two robotic missions to the solar system's hottest planet. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is returning to sizzling Venus, our closest yet perhaps most overlooked neighbor, after decades of exploring other worlds.

The space agency’s new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced two new robotic missions to the solar system’s hottest planet, during his first major address to employees Wednesday.

“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” Nelson said.

One mission named DaVinci Plus will analyze the thick, cloudy Venusian atmosphere in an attempt to determine whether the inferno planet ever had an ocean and was possibly habitable. A small craft will plunge through the atmosphere to measure the gases.

It will be the first U.S.-led mission to the Venusian atmosphere since 1978.

The other mission, called Veritas, will seek a geologic history by mapping the rocky planet’s surface.

“It is astounding how little we know about Venus,” but the new missions will give fresh views of the planet’s atmosphere, made up mostly of carbon dioxide, down to the core, NASA scientist Tom Wagner said in a statement.

NASA’s top science official, Thomas Zurbuchen, calls it “a new decade of Venus.” Each mission, launching around 2029, will receive $500 million for development under NASA’s Discovery program.

The missions beat out two other proposed projects, to Jupiter’s moon Io and Neptune’s icy moon Triton.