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

Mercury?

[DarkKnightRadick]

"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."

Will a spacecraft even last 4 years that close to the sun? Does it plan on staying on the "dark side" of Mercury?

I mean, the article says that "The frame for Messenger's signature sunshade - which will protect the craft and its instruments from the intense heat at Mercury - is due to arrive this week from GenCorp Aerojet. Layers of ceramic fabric will be added to the frame at APL over the next two months." but will that be enough? I mean it is the sun after all. I'd be surprised if it didn't fry as soon as it got within Mercury's gravitational field.

Re:Mercury?

[CheshireCatCO]

Of course NASA/APL/LASP has thought through this. The heat shield will do the job. All it has to do is relect the light, after all. The heat can only get to the spacecraft via radiation, so no convection or conduction. (Except a little done the heat-shield holding arms.) The bigger worry is Mercury itself. That chunk of rock is really hot, and the IR radiation coming from it will at some points of orbit be hitting the spacecraft's unshielded side. As I recall, the solution is to not do that for very long and then spend more time away from Mercury, radiating the heat away.

Re:Mercury?

[Gilthalas]

The above poster is correct, I believe. I don't work on Messenger, but from what I've seen and from this page Messenger's orbit is highly elliptical, with it's sunshield always facing the sun (duh) so the main components should have time to cool down why at the peaks of the orbit (i.e. when it is not looking at Mercury).

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.)

Duh

[pmz]

Everyone already knows that Earth is the mating grounds for the Venusians and the Martians. Why speculate about life with which we are already intimately familiar?

Re:Hoyle, covered in oil

[GigsVT]

wouldn't a 'mozillion' be a cool number?

Mozillion - The number of seconds it takes for Mozilla to start up.

Call Bush

[AndrewRUK]

Quick!
Call Bush to tell him that Venus has oil. That should get more funding for space exploration :-)
Unless he's heard of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," in which case he'll probably start a war against women^W^W^W^W^W take action to liberate the women of Venus from an evil opressive dictator...

uh...

[eglamkowski]

David Grinspoon says: First let me say that I am a big fan of carbon-based life. Some of my best friends are carbon-based.

I'd sure hope so...

Life on Venus

[Muhammar]

1. Strongly acidic media (diluted sulfuric acid) is not a big deal: there are microbs on Earth that thrive in diluted sulfuric acid (like pH=0) 2. Strong UV is bigger problem: enegetic UV is enormously destructive to carbon-based life 3. Some moisture is probably needed, and there is not much of it in the clouds in liquid form 4. The strongly UV-absorbing material in clouds can very easily be a mixture of sulfurous compounds: The products formed in system H2S + SO2 + S (irradiated by UV) are qute complex and very, very UV absorbing. They form and decompose easily. So we may have the photochemical processes high up in the clouds (which produce or destroys the compounds) and pyrolitic processes by the surface (which does a different chemistry). So we would have these various bands of cloud material with different levels of UV absorbing sulfur compounds - depending whether they were iradiated by strong UV or exposed to the hot interior of the atmosphere. You do not need a life to explain this - a simple thermal convection will do the same. And, I found the idea of life (single cell -like?) in atmosphere causing its super-rotation on planetary level (because it gives these microbs an evolutionary advantage) just preposterous. No living organism can produce energy enough to move around atmosphere of entire planet at speeds 200+mph. Only the sun energy can do that.

Look at it scientifically

[Sifersdomain]

Anything can exist anywhere. As long as they have adapted to there living environment. It is possible that a chunk on rock with small traces of life on it could have been projected off earth and landed on Venus; the life form evolves and adapts to the radiation and heat allowing it to live in that what we think of harsh conditions. Then, as for the resources it would need to survive, it is possible that it could adapt to live off the heat or to live off even oil.

What is life?

[clambake]

I think the reason why Venus sounds like such an incredibly bad place to find life is that a lot of us consider "life" to be humans and ducks and such. What is the core of life? Life is just a very complex machine for converting stuff to energy and then using that energy to do stuff. Venus has tons and tons of energy just hanging around. Life on Venus wouldn't need to eat, it could just sit there and absorb all the 800 degree goodness in little bio-capacitors. If it did eat, it wouldn't have to spend any time creating digestive juices, it could just open it's mouth when it rained. For us, Venus would suck, but for life adapted to Venus, it would be paradise.