Venus and Life

An anonymous reader writes "Venus-- thought in the 1950's by British astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle, to be covered in oil-- is discussed today by NASA's Principal Investigator for Planetary Atmospheres and Venus Data Analysis Program as having water in its atmosphere, and strange ultraviolet absorbers that swirl in the upper clouds. He speculates on the four ways that Venus might harbor life. Today's Cessna 182 crash led to the tragic death of the spacecraft manager for the highly successful Venus Magellan radar mapping mission, Gary Parker. The next scheduled Venus fly-by will be in 2004 and 2006 by the Johns Hopkins/Goddard Messenger spacecraft on its four-year mission to study Mercury."

Comments

Re:Hoyle, covered in oil

[Anonymous Coward]

A much better quote from Hoyle (more colorful) is

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing-747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? [Fred Hoyle(1983): "The Intelligent Universe", page 19. ]

Sorry if it offends your religion. And his guesstimate was 1 in 10^40000 odds of life beginning on earth by stochastic means. Such an optimist he was.

Re:Mercury?

[CheshireCatCO]

Pardon if I'm being daft, but are you thinking that this hasn't been thought about?

Gamma rays ARE light and can be blocked by about a centimeter (or two) of a reasonably dense metal. And I'm pretty sure that the Sun doesn't give a lot of them off most of the time when it's quiet, being a blackbody peaking in the visible.

Alpha and beta particles won't penetrate a metal heat shield of any appreciable thickness. Since Messanger will spend at least some of it's time inside of Mercury's magnetosphere (I'd need the specs on the orbit to figure out how much, or if it's the entire orbit) alpha and beta particles from the Sun won't be reaching it *anyway*. (The Sun emits electrons and *protons* in abundance as a solar wind. Not quite so much in the way of helium nuclei. But the solar wind doesn't penetrate the magnetosphere proper.)

In any event, these things don't usually do much damage for their heat. They tend to mess with electronics by flipping bits and damaging the electronic substrates. NASA won't let them fly non-radiation hardened electronics. (In fact, all chips will probably have been tested on earlier missions nearer Earth.)