Bad News for Venusian Life Enthusiasts

A few months ago scientists found evidence of phosphine gas in the Venusian atmosphere. Phosphine is a gas produced by microbial life, and finding it on Venus was a big enough deal that nonscience-specific news organizations picked up on it, like the New York Times. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the initial discovery of phosphine has turned out to be more complicated and not nearly as good for the prospect of Venusian life. Let's start with the big bummer: It wasn't actually phosphine that was detected. Spectral analysis is tough, and sometimes one chemical can be mistaken for another. That's what happened here. The phosphine was actually sulfur dioxide, which is both incredibly common on Venus and not associated with life in any way. In addition, that signal was coming from much higher up in the atmosphere, at an altitude where the sun's radiation would almost immediately destroy phosphine. So yeah, while there may very well be life in the Venusian atmosphere, we're still a long way off from finding it.

Could Venus Harbor Native Life?

Yes, this is a question people are asking. And it may not be quite as crazy as you might think.

Clearly, there isn't going to be any life on the surface of Venus. It's about 750 degrees too hot there for even the hardiest of single-celled organisms. For life to exist on the Venusian surface, it would have to be beyond anything we've ever seen. Almost beyond the realm of fiction. The upper atmosphere of Venus may be a different story. The pressure and temperature is actually fairly hospitable if you're at the right altitude.

Of course, what would a crazy theory be without evidence? And this time we have some interesting observations from the Japanese space probe Akatsuki, which observed periodic dark patches in the upper atmosphere rich in sulfur. The particles in these patches have the similar dimensions to terrestrial bacteria, and the periodic nature of the patches could indicate a phenomenon similar to algae blooms here on Earth.

So is there life on Venus? Can we add it to the list of places in the Solar System where life likely exists? I'd say probably not. But there's a chance, and it's probably worth checking out. And since Venus is pretty close, we may check it out sometime in the next 10-15 years. We'll see. I won't hold my breath, but I have to say, it would be kind of funny if the first extraterrestrial life we found was on Venus.

A New Idea For Exploring Venus

Venus is not a nice place. The atmosphere is basically all carbon dioxide, it rains acid, and the surface temperature is about 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite being closer than Mars, no space probe has touched down on Venus since the mid 1980s. Why would we bother? Your typical spacecraft would last a few hours at most before succumbing to the extreme conditions. To explore the Venusian surface, we'd have to bring something very atypical.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Enter the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments. This isn't a copy of the rovers currently trundling around Mars. This would basically be a tank. No, seriously, it even looks like a WWI-era tank. But the big thing is that most of it would be mechanical, not electronic. Electronics are too fragile for Venus, unless they're buried deep inside, away from the heat. The rover would mostly rely on wind for power, and would communicate with an overhead orbiter using, essentially, Morse code. The people behind the concept believe they could get nearly a year of research out of the rover before the Venusian environment proves too much. Not a huge amount of time, but definitely better than a couple of hours.

I really hope this particular concept becomes a reality. I don't know, I just think there's something really cool about it. It's very outside the box. We think of space travel as the cutting edge of technology, but in the case of Venus, the environment is so relentlessly terrible that you have to think in the opposite direction. Don't get fancy, get simple. Don't send a delicate, spindly little thing, send a tank.

Ice Planets Moving Within Their Star's Habitable Zone Will Skip Habitability

It's bad news for Arthur C. Clarke today. Computer models now suggest that moons or planets composed mainly of ice that warm up as their star becomes more luminous with age will not become nice places to live.

It made a lot of sense, really. Oh, warm up the giant ice cube, then you've got a bunch of water. Unfortunately, it takes more energy to melt a planet covered in ice than what the Earth receives, and by the time the ice does melt, the combo of reduced surface albedo (how reflective the surface is), increased solar radiation, and water vapor's status as a potent greenhouse gas would lead to a very quick runaway greenhouse effect. You'd go from Europa to Venus in no time at all.

So for any monoliths hanging around, don't go transforming Jupiter into a star to help out that native Europan life. Turns out, they're better off as they are.

In completely unrelated news, my review for Atlantic City Country Club is coming along nicely, and it'll be done before the end of the month. Here's a little teaser of the sort of course we're dealing with.

Even if I hadn't been playing from the back tees, I would have on that hole.

Anyway, I'm going to make a commitment to doing a golf course review once a month from now on. I enjoy playing new golf courses, I enjoy taking pictures of golf courses, and I enjoy writing about them. Maintaining that schedule might get dicey over the winter, so hopefully I can build up a backlog so I don't have to go roaming for warm weather on the last weekend in January.

Something on Venus is Colder Than Expected

That's not a phrase often used when talking about the second planet from the Sun. "Colder Than Expected". This is Venus we're talking about, the planet where the rain is sulfuric acid, and the surface temperature sits at a rather toasty 900 degrees Fahrenheit. But that's the news we've gotten from the no-longer-with-us Venus Express, whose mission officially ended in December 2014. Hey, it takes a while to get through all the data.

In 2014, the probe ran out of fuel, and as it slowly fell towards Venus, its orbits actually took it through the upper portion of the upper Venusian atmosphere, specifically at the poles. While the probe was down there, the people in charge decided to do some science. The probe found that the upper atmosphere was sitting around -250 degrees Fahrenheit, significantly colder than what was expected. They also found that at heights of 130 and 140 kilometers, atmospheric pressure was 22% and 40% less than expected.

So why is this occurring? Scientists believe it has something to do with the presence of Venus' strong polar vortices, along with strong atmospheric gravity waves.

The scientists also note that the Venus Express trip through the Venusian atmosphere will be useful for the ExoMars probe, which will be undergoing aerobraking when it arrives at Mars.