Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
wouldn't a 'mozillion' be a cool number?
Mozillion - The number of seconds it takes for Mozilla to start up.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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.)
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.
We are not tech freaks, nor tech addicts, but merely Technology experts.
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.