Lifeboat Foundation

The California-based company aims to launch a private Venus mission in 2023 to hunt for signs of life in the clouds where scientists just spotted the possible biosignature gas phosphine. But that landmark effort will be just the beginning, if all goes according to plan.

Rocket Lab’s life-hunting Venus mission in 2023 will be just the beginning, if all goes according to the company’s plan.

Discovering chemical substances as possible chemical markers of life existence in Venus’s atmosphere via remote astronomical observations cannot be considered objective evidence of life existence on the planet, says Roscosmos Executive Director for Science and Advanced Programs Alexander Bloshenko. ‘Credible scientific data on that matter can be obtained only via contact explorations of the planet’s surface and atmosphere,’ he added.

Notably, the USSR was the only country to conduct regular explorations of Venus using on-planet stations. The first ever soft landing on another planet’s surface in the Solar system was performed in 1970 by the Venera-7 descent module. Several orbital missions and landings provided detailed data on the Venerian climate, soil and atmosphere composition. The Soviet Venera-13 spacecraft still holds the record as the longest active spacecraft on Venus remaining operational for 127 minutes.

A huge breakaway of the Soviet Union from its competitors in exploration of Venus contributed to the fact that USA called Venus a ‘Soviet planet’. Having recently analyzed the pictures of Venus captured by Soviet missions, scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences claimed they discovered moving objects and even might be living. And it remains to be seen, whether these guesses are true.

Continue reading “Proofs of life on Venus can be obtained only through contact explorations” »

With today’s news of the first-ever detection of an intact planet closely orbiting a stellar white dwarf, a team led by two Cornell University astronomers has also shown that NASA’s forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would be capable of detecting biosignatures from earth-sized planets orbiting such dying stars.

As reported in the journal Nature, the white dwarf in question —- WD 1856+534 —- is now thought to harbor a Jupiter-size object orbiting this dying stellar core on an insanely short orbit of only 34 hours. But even before today’s announcement, Cornell astronomers were testing their idea that the Webb telescope might also be able to detect earth-sized objects within the same system.

In separate research submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Cornell University astronomers Lisa Kaltenegger and Ryan MacDonald and the paper’s 1^st co-authors, lay out their case for using the Webb telescope to look for very short transits of such rocky worlds as they pass in front of the these white dwarfs. They used WD 1856+534, which is only 40 percent larger than Earth and lies only 80 lights years away in the constellation of Draco, as their test case.

Millions of space nerds reacted with joy Monday to a study showing the atmosphere of Venus contains phosphine, a chemical byproduct of biological life. But none would have been more thrilled or less surprised by the discovery than the late, great Carl Sagan — who said this day might come more than 50 years ago.

Now best remembered as the presenter of the most-viewed-ever PBS series Cosmos, the author of the book behind the movie Contact, and the guy who put gold disks of Earth music on NASA’s Voyager missions, Sagan actually got his start studying our closest two planets. He became an astronomer after being inspired as a kid by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ space fantasies, set on Mars and Venus.

‘Cosmos’ presenter Carl Sagan was one of the world’s top experts on Venus, and he saw first what scientists have just announced: possible life on Venus.

This week, astronomers have detected phosphine on Venus- an element that is often associated with living processes here on Earth. As such, in this video, we will talk about how strong of evidence this is for life on Venus and what this means for humanity.

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Venus is suddenly a new hotspot for astrobiology, but its real value may be in what it teaches us about the evolution of life on our own planet.

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Continue reading “Possible signs of alien life discovered on Venus” »

Astronomers have detected a stinky gas on Venus called phosphine, and weirdly enough, it could be a sign of alien life in the planet’s clouds. It’s still too early to say for sure that Venus hosts life forms, but the discovery opens up a lot of questions about what’s happening on Earth’s neighbor.

A sample-return mission to our planetary neighbor should now be considered.