Scientists are studying the possibility of life on Earth Venusin conjunction with the preparation of a series of missions space explorationwhich is expected to be launched next year 2023.
And Venus Or, as the “fiery” planet is called, one of the closest neighbors to Earth, known for its inhospitable environment, sulfur clouds and hot volcanic surface where the temperature reaches 464 degrees Celsius, which means that if the alien life lies there, it might be stranger than our dreams.
While both NASA and … haveEuropean space agency (ESA) plans to investigate the planet in general, but such plans are not expected to take place until 2028.
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A team led by MIT astronomer Sarah Seager has launched their mission to explore the planet, called the Venus Life Finder (VLF) project, and the team hopes the mission will launch as early as May 2023.
“NASA and the European Space Agency are very slow, especially with the discovery of life,” Berlin Technical University astronomer Dirk Schulz-Makuch, who is not currently involved in the project, told The Daily Beast.
He added: “There hasn’t been a single mission to discover life since the 1970s, when Viking landers traveled to Mars, although the technology and environmental understanding of nearby planetary bodies have improved a lot.
The Venus Life Finder project will include three separate missions, each of which will involve sending a probe into the toxic planet’s atmosphere and collecting data to help the team determine if there is life there, but they are all unique in their own right. approach.
The first mission will launch a probe directly through the planet’s acidic atmosphere at maximum speed, while the second mission will send a balloon to carry measuring instruments through the 40-mile-thick cloud layer.
The third mission is the most ambitious: the team hopes to collect a sample of the dense acid clouds surrounding the planet and send it back to Earth for analysis.
“We have designed and conducted experiments in chemistry and biology to address critical scientific objectives related to habitability and the pursuit of life,” said the VLF team writing for the scientific journal Aerospace.
They added that NASA and ESA’s projects on the planet “are intended for general studies of the properties of the planets and do not address issues of habitability and astrobiology.”
And while the team may be ahead of its more established rivals, they pointed out that space research was a collaborative effort and that they didn’t want to take NASA or the European Space Agency lightly.
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