Russia plots return to Venus

Now, after a lull of almost three decades, Russia is making plans for a new mission to the "morning star" and has invited Western scientists to participate.
Last week, Moscow-based space research institute IKI hosted an international conference aimed at luring scientists from Europe and possibly other countries such as the US into the ambitious project, officially scheduled for launch in 2016.

news.bbc.co.uk...

It's about time !!

Why do we seem to neglect this planet ? We seem to have tunnel vision focused solely on Mars , don't get me wrong , send all the probes to Mars you like but lets not neglect our other nabors .

Its just that Venus is not a planet that we can easily settle. That whole place is just one big rain cloud, made of sulfur. Who would want to live on a planet where it rains sulfuric acid.

Mars on the other hand has potential for us settling it.

reply to post by Doc Tesla


Actually, the idea of creating cities that could float in Venus's upper atmosphere has been around for decades and is extremely viable with the invention of carbon nanotubes as a construction material. Unlike Mars, you could walk around outside with just an oxygen mask, as the pressure and temperature would be quite survivable.

Mars, on the other hand, might as well be the moon in terms of stepping outside your door.

People at IKI are almost certainly strapped for cash and want sponsors from abroad. That's all there is to this story. Sure there is some technology they have from early 1960s when they actually flew to Venus and landed a robotic craft, but it's nothing revolutionary.

Floating cities on Venus is a fantastic idea but it will be impractical for a very long time. Building a dome on Mars is 100 times more realistic. Terraforming has a chance to work as well.

Even if a human expedition is out of the question at the current time it would still be of great importance to send probes to Venus . We could learn a lot about Venus and how it once was .

I am still holding out for a serious attempt to study Jupiter's moon Europa .

I would like to see someone (Russia, ESA, NASA) go to Venus and study the atmosphere in detail. There are NASA biologists who have speculated that there is some possible evidence of biological processes occurring in the clouds of Venus.

From what we can detect, there are trace gasses in Venus' atmosphere that may not be in chemical equilibrium with each other. These gasses "should" be in a natural equilibrium, but some process or processes seem to be creating a disequilibrium. One possible explanation for this disequilibrium could be presence of biological processes.

Here is an excerpt of a paper written by a scientist at NASA's John Glenn Research Center that discusses this possibility:

3.3 Present Life

Could bacterial life exist in the atmosphere of Venus today? Although this is considered unlikely, the possibility of life in the clouds or the middle atmosphere of Venus has not been ruled out by any observations made to date. While the atmosphere is both dry and acidic,extremophilic life has adapted to far more harsh conditions on Earth.

There is some evidence that the trace-gas constituents of the Venus atmosphere are not in chemical equilibrium with each other. On Earth, the primary source of disequilibrium in the atmospheric chemistry is the activities of biological processing; could disequilibrium on Venus also be a sign of life? In 1997, David Grinspoon made the suggestion that microbes in the clouds and middle atmosphere [4] could be the source of the disequilibrium. In 2002, Dirk Schulze-Makuch [6] independently proposed that observations of the Venus atmosphere by space probes showed signatures of possible biological activity.

As noted by Grinspoon and Schulze-Makuch, the Venus atmosphere has several trace gasses which are not in chemical equilibrium. The Venera missions and the Pioneer Venus and Magellan probes found that carbon monoxide is scarce in the planet's atmosphere, although solar radiation and lightning should produce it abundantly from carbon dioxide. Hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide, two gases which react with each other and thus should not be found together, are also both present, indicating some process (possibly biological?) is producing them. Finally, although carbonyl sulfide is difficult to produce inorganically, it is present in the Venusian atmosphere. On Earth, this gas would be considered an unambiguous indicator of biological activity. While none of these chemical combinations are in themselves an unambiguous sign of life, it is interesting enough to warrant a more careful look at the atmospheric chemistry.

Another interesting sign is the nature of the ultraviolet-absorbing aerosols that form the markings seen in UV images of the planet (figure 2). The nature of these aerosols, and whether they are biological in origin, is still unknown.

On Earth, viable microorganisms are found in clouds...

Source:
This is the source NASA web page containing a pdf link to this paper -- scroll down on the website to find the PDF link:
Website -- NASA.gov -- Astrobiology: The Case for Venus
Or, here is the direct link to the PDF file:
PDF file -- Astrobiology: The Case for Venus


[edit on 10/8/2009 by Soylent Green Is People]

reply to post by D.E.M.


For one thing, you certainly can't just walk around venus with an oxygen mask. The atmospheric pressure is something 100 times that of earths, so good luck if you want to try that. Pancaked!

reply to post by Smugallo

I guess that's why D.E.M. was talking about cities floating in the upper atmosphere and not on the surface.