According to MIT News, a commercial business from the United States will launch a mission to Venus to look for signs of life.
A recent paper produced by a group of scientists lead by Massachusetts Institute of Technology academics describes the scientific strategy and reasoning for a succession of diverse private missions to seek for indications of life in the super-acidic atmosphere of a second planet from the Sun.
They entail launching low-cost tiny spacecraft to find life on Venus. One of the authors of the new research paper Sarah Seeger is confident that such a budgetary mission will become a faster way of developing space science.
The first mission, to be launched in 2023, will be managed and funded by California-based Rocket Lab.
The company’s Electron rocket will launch a 50-pound probe on its Photon spacecraft on a five-month, 38 million-mile trek to Venus, all for a three-minute fly through Venus’ clouds. The probe will use a laser created particularly for the mission to look for traces of a complicated chemical reaction in the droplets it meets when temporarily enveloped in haze.
The presence of fluorescence or contaminants in the droplets may suggest that areas of Venus’s atmosphere are livable. Experts lead by Sarah Seeger are certain that researching Venus is critical.
Several chemical abnormalities on Venus have led scientists to believe that life, in some form, may exist there.
Whatever is discovered in the 2023 expedition, the following mission is already scheduled for 2026. This probe will have a heavier cargo, including a balloon that will allow it to spend longer time among Venus’s clouds and perform more thorough research. As a result of this expedition, a sample obtained in Venus’s atmosphere might be returned to Earth.
