For the first time, the surface of Venus has been imaged in visible wavelengths from space. The camera on the Parker Solar Probe pierced through the thick Venusian cloud cover and captured blurred but extremely valuable images of the highlands and lowlands of the planet. The breakthrough images came thanks to a spacecraft with an …
The Surface of Venus Was Thought to Be Stagnant. But This May Not Be True
An oblique radar view of the largest "pack ice" block in the Venus lowlands identified by Byrne et al. (Paul Byrne, based on original NASA/JPL imagery). The two Earth-sized planets in our solar system have taken wildly different evolutionary routes. The surface of the Earth became a temperate utopia for a liquid water and a …
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And Then There Were Three: ESA Follows NASA in Selecting a Mission to Venus
Artist illustration of the EnVision orbiter at Venus (ESA/VR2Planets/DamiaBouic) It was quite a week for Venus scientists. Just seven days after NASA announced the selection of two Venus missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed that a third Venus mission had been chosen for the agency’s medium-class mission category. (See last week’s …
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Return to Hell: NASA Selects Two Missions to Venus to Explore the Pathway to Habitability
Artists’ renderings show the VERITAS spacecraft (left) and DAVINCI+ probe (right) as they arrive at Venus (Lockheed Martin). For NASA scientists, Venus missions must feel like buses. You wait thirty years for one, and then two come along at once. Last week, NASA selected two Venus missions for the space agency’s Discovery Program; solar system …
Strong Doubts Arise About the Reported Phosphine Biosignature in the Atmosphere of Venus
What started as a stunning announcement that the chemical phosphine -- a known byproduct of life -- had been found in the clouds of Venus and could signal the presence of some lifeform has now been strongly critiqued by a number of groups of scientists. As a result, there is growing doubt that the finding, …
Could Life Exist in the Clouds of Venus?
Nightside of Venus captured with the IR2 (infrared) camera on JAXA's Akatsuki climate orbiter (JAXA). On September 14 at 3pm GMT, an embargo lifted on a research paper reporting evidence for biological activity on Venus. Speculation about the discovery had been spreading rapidly through social media for several days, proving that scientists are incapable of …
Searching for the Edge of Habitability
Topographical map of Venus by NASA's Magellan spacecraft (1990 - 1994). Color indicates height. (NASA/JPL/USGS) How many habitable worlds like our own could exist around other stars? Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, the answer to this question has seemed tantalizingly close. But to estimate the number of Earths, we first need to understand …
The Gale Winds of Venus Suggest How Locked Exoplanets Could Escape a Fate of Extreme Heat and Brutal Cold
More than two decades before the first exoplanet was discovered, an experiment was performed using a moving flame and liquid mercury that could hold the key to habitability on tidally locked worlds. The paper was published in a 1969 edition of the international journal, Science, by researchers Schubert and Whitehead. The pair reported that …
What Would Happen If Mars And Venus Swapped Places?
What would happen if you switched the orbits of Mars and Venus? Would our solar system have more habitable worlds? It was a question raised at the “Comparative Climatology of Terrestrial Planets III”; a meeting held in Houston at the end of August. It brought together scientists from disciplines that included astronomers, climate science, …
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To Understand Habitability, We Need to Return to Venus
“You can feel what it’s like on Venus here on Earth,” said Kevin McGouldrick from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Heat a hot plate until it glows red, place your palm on its surface and then run over that hand with a truck.” The surface of Venus …
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Many Worlds 