The planet Venus is in so many ways an enigma. It’s a sister planet to Earth and also within relatively easy reach of our instruments and probes, yet we nevertheless know precious little about what is going on its surface or even inside its dense atmosphere. Much of this is of course due to planets like Mars getting all the orbiting probes and rovers scurrying around on its barren, radiation-blasted surface, but we had atmospheric probes descend through Venus’ atmosphere, so far to little avail. Back in 2020 speculation arose of phosphine being detected in Venus’ atmosphere, which caused both excitement and a lot of skepticism. Regardless, at the recent National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2024) the current state of Venusian knowledge was discussed, which even got The Guardian to report on it.
In addition to phosphine, there’s speculation of ammonia also being detectable from Earth, both of which might be indicative of organic processes and thus potentially life. Related research has indicated that common amino acids essential to life on Earth would be stable even in sulfuric droplets like in Venus’ atmosphere. After criticism to the original 2020 phosphine article, [Jane S. Greaves] et al. repeated their observations based on feedback, although it’s clear that the observation of phosphine gas on Venus is not a simple binary question.
The same is true of ammonia, which if present in Venusian clouds would be a massive discovery, which according to research by [William Bains] and colleagues in PNAS could explain many curious observations in Venus’ atmosphere. With so much uncertainty with remote observations, it’s clear that the only way that we are going to answer these questions is with future Venus missions, which sadly remain rather sparse.
If there’s indeed life on Venus, it’ll have a while longer to evolve before we can go and check it out.
” like Mars getting all the orbiting probes and rovers scurrying around on its barren, radiation-blasted surface”
Yeah, well there is the minor points of Venus having 92 atmospheres pressure, nearly 500°C temperature of sulfuric acid laden conditions inhibiting the ‘scurrying around’ of rovers…
But that surface is not where you would be likely to find life anyway, which is why the picture at the top shows blimps.
Venus sounds like what we used to call “a bad neighborhood”. Sister planet? No. I’d like to start disownment procedures. I’m fine right here, haven’t finished messing this place up. From a pure science point of view the development of a superweapon to destroy Venus would throw off many ancillary results in even the basic sciences as we saw with the Manhattan Project. The problem with Mars of course is less lack of oxygen than lack of air pressure. We’re not moving there en masse but it could be the equivalent of Antarctica as a science platform.
What this article fails to explain is that at the right altitude Venus has the same atmospheric pressure as earth, so with a breathing mask it might be possible to exist there without a spacesuit. It would require platforms kept aloft by balloons.
“at the right altitude Venus has the same atmospheric pressure as earth”
as does Earth.
“so with a breathing mask it might be possible to exist there without a spacesuit” Mind the ammonia!
“something something balloons.” NASA’s predecessor looked at nuclear powered balloons back in the 1950s but the consensus was a no-go.
The balloons don’t need to be lighter than air, though – due to the density of the atmosphere, they’d literally just float at the correct altitude, like ships in the sea.
The bigger danger would be atmospheric stirring caused by violent storms…
The consensus from the better part of a century ago says no, welp, better pack it up guys.
Chemically speaking. I am curious as to how to get sulfuric acid (strong acid) and ammonia (strong base) to exist in the same medium without reacting to form a neutral compound. Curious minds would like to know.
Very high pressure and temperature? I do have a minor issue with ammonia @500C, but that’s just me I suppose
Atmospheric layering, most likely.
I like an idea I read in an Arthur C Clarke book… go to the outer solar system, recover cometary ice and debris, and bombard Venus with it.
Well if you can figure a way to take the sulphur out then sulphuric acid has all the ingredients to make oxygen and water, but how we do that, well, maybe by 2524.
Eternal convection between upper layers cool enough for life to evolve and hotter layers would keep everything sterile.
Sure, that’s why the Earth’s upper atmosphere is the same temperature and pressure as the Sahara. The cold trap, what’s that?
We’re talking about something 7500 miles wide and billions of years old, not a bowl of soup you just popped in the microwave.
We should make a “Super Ball Bot” probe to walk on Venus.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/super-ball-bot/
This could be done with some of the better alloys. The controls could be small vacuum tubes. It’s so hot it wouldn’t need heaters for the tubes. The computer could be minimal. Maybe made of tiny vacuum tubes. The power could come from solar with a sodium battery back up for surge movement. Use magnetic amplifiers instead of transistors, or maybe vacuum tubes. The solar would be a cheap dish in the center of the Ball Bot with a Stirling or other power source. To climb hills it could have a squish flattening mode for better traction. With a lot of feet nodes, with claws, it could climb mountains like a mountain goat. It wouldn’t need much power. A humans output working steady is around 40 watts. Would need much less to roll around and maybe pick at rocks with a pick and shovel every so often. It could be linked to three or four mini SATs with phased array radar in orbit to help guide it.
To those that are skeptical, look at the numbers. Venus is 3760 miles diameter at the equator.
“…It takes 224.7 Earth days for Venus to complete an orbit around the Sun, and a Venusian solar year is just under two Venusian days long…”
So 112 earth days to go 3760 miles is 33.57 miles a day(all with continuous sunlight), about 1.4 miles per hour. I don’t think that’s out of the question, and you could move to a higher latitude. Maybe best to start at higher latitude, going slow and continue to go around. Always keeping in sunlight. It could go forever or until it broke down. It would be fairly simple, no telling how long something like this could last.
At Venus’ surface, solar could net you about 9W/m² (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150016298/downloads/20150016298.pdf). I was surprised to learn that they would actually work and survive under those conditions. There are also suggestions to use RTGs. The surface of Venus is very dry, so it’s my impression that the sulfuric acid would mostly be a problem on the way down, not on the surface.
As for the electronics, there’s some promising work on Silicon Carbide-based electronics (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205004681/downloads/High%20Temp%20Electronics%20Progress%20White%20paper%20Hunter%20NASA%20Glenn.pdf), no need for vacuum tubes.
While there are no COTS Venus-ready actuators, there are multiple studies on the topic, and it doesn’t appear to be a big challenge compared to the above.
That leaves us with sensors. Many could probably be made to function at ~460°C, but possibly not all. Can we actively cool some?
Landers have reached Venus’s surface. It’s a little awkward for this article to try and dodge that, and I don’t really understand why it did.
Ahh “technically correct” strikes again. It’s true, there have been missions to Venus’s surface, but if we look at the numbers it’s easy to see how they said “all” instead of “almost all”. There were 33 launches to mars in since the 1990s, in the same time period only 9 to Venus.
That’s a pretty skewed ratio, *especially* when you look at the missions and discover that 5 of those were just after gravity assists, another 2 were flyby’s (one of which didn’t make observations, the second of which didn’t work). That leaves us 2 orbiters specifically doing science in the last 30 years. Oh and if we’re talking explicitly landers, the last one of those was from the Soviets in ’84.
So yes, “all” is incorrect. But personally I’m not going to deduct any points for it :)
It was kinda fun though to do a dive through the list of Venus missions to see just how skewed it was, so thanks for giving me that excuse to do so. I didn’t realize anyone had dropped something onto the planet in my lifetime (albeit barely)