North of London | Or maybe from instruments we send to another planet or moon in the Solar system
Was just reading about this space mission that is planned for the near future to help either confirm or deny what some indicators about Venus
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/new-space-mission-to-venus-could-reveal-signs-of-alien-life/
NEXT SUMMER, scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology will launch an uncrewed spacecraft to explore our nearest planetary neighbour — not the one you’re thinking of, though. “Mars gets all the attention,” laments Sara Seager, the Toronto native who is leading the project, “and Venus gets ignored.” But that may soon change. Back in 2020, Seager and her colleagues published observations from two powerful telescopes suggesting, somewhere in the clouds of Venus’s atmosphere, the apparent presence of phosphine — a molecule that, on Earth, is associated with living organisms. Venus is a barren hellscape at ground level, with intense atmospheric pressure and temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Up in the clouds, however, the temperature and pressure are more Earth-like. In the 1960s, astronomer Carl Sagan suggested those clouds might sustain life. The catch: the clouds are made of sulphuric acid. After the phosphine observation, Seager ran a series of experiments showing that certain amino acids and DNA components — building blocks of life — can stay intact in sulphuric acid. |