Royal Astronomical Society's press release will be held at 4 pm (according to twitter time zone is GMT+1)
https://twitter.com/RoyalAstroSoc/status/1305454796225351682
Press conference live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IIj3e5BFp0
Press conference live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IIj3e5BFp0
- Phosphene found
- We don't know how it could naturally occur in Venus without life
- We don't know any life that could survive in so that acidic environment (toughest microbes in earth survive 5%, Venus's atmosphere has 90%)
- We need to send a probe to test
/s
If the probe was built to withstand higher temperatures it could descend towards the end of the mission and do more work at lower altitudes. It's unlikely there would be a surface mission because of the weight involved with keeping electronics working at 464°C/867°F.
An initial probe to determine if life is actually there is going to be tough, but maybe doable. But the real jazz is in sample return.
You'd want those little critters in human hands so you can do experiments and really study them. That is a very tall order, depending on the conditions that these bugs may be in. You gotta keep them alive for the return trip, with only basic ideas of their life cycle and proclivities. An aerobrake, that's hard, but doable. But if the things only live in a thick part of the atmosphere, then you gotta get back into orbit while hanging off a balloon. Or something like that. Not easy.
Even on Mars, with less gravity and less atmosphere and cold temperatures, we've never done sample return. It's really really hard to do. Venus ups the hard parts of Mars even more so.
But Life (if it's there) is just too seductive. It'd be a space race like no other, NASA, ESA, Russia, China, all vying for viable sample return. God, that may be a really cool thing to see. It would totally change how we think of ourselves in the solar system, if not the universe.
[0] Venus is tidally locked to the Sun (kinda), year/day is the same time length.
If there ever were a premise for one in our time it would be fusion, or carbon extraction... but this seems to be either woefully underfunded or in the hands of private enterprise.
Given the way the starlink was heralded by the media, the time of nations challenging each other to technological conquests is now commandeered by the venture capitalists.
These are not research fields with a definite, discrete goal condition. They are ongoing research fields.
The discovery of extra-terrestrial life is a huge, discrete goal condition. Everyone will remember which team/country first discovers and demonstrates such life. Few will remember who confirmed it (i.e. who came second).
It's not like we're short on Nobel Prizes here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1u-jlf_Olo
A caller asked Professor Sara Seager about sending a probe with a balloon, and she likes that idea, and said that was what the Vega program previously did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program
>The Vega program (Cyrillic: ВеГа) was a series of Venus missions that also took advantage of the appearance of comet 1P/Halley in 1986. Vega 1 and Vega 2 were uncrewed spacecraft launched in a cooperative effort among the Soviet Union (who also provided the spacecraft and launch vehicle) and Austria, Bulgaria, France, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Federal Republic of Germany in December 1984. They had a two-part mission to investigate Venus and also flyby Halley's Comet.
A Russian caller mentioned a proposed Russian space mission to Venus called Venera-D:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera-D
>Venera-D (Russian: Венера-Д, pronounced [vʲɪˈnʲɛrə ˈdɛ]) is a proposed Russian space mission to Venus that would include an orbiter and a lander to be launched in 2026 or 2031. The orbiter's prime objective is to perform observations with the use of a radar. The lander, based on the Venera design, would be capable of operating for a long duration (≈3 h) on the planet's surface. The "D" in Venera-D stands for "dolgozhivushaya," which means "long lasting" in Russian.
The live stream that I can see is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1u-jlf_Olo
To the best of the reasearchers' knowledge: All known pathways to produce phosphane couldn't explain the observation (they were talking several orders of magnitude off). Abiotic 'exotic' chemistry is still an option (ie the 'unknown unknown' hasn't been ruled out).
It's impossible to rule out an "unknown unknown" by definition, because if you did then it wouldn't be "unknown" anymore.
That's K-K, not U-U.
There are unknown biotic pathways known to exist (from the press conference, biotic phosphane production on earth apparently still has some large question marks attached?).
There might be unknown abiotic pathways ('unknown unknowns'). In principle, there could be some clever way to rule them out based on the constraints of the Venusian environment.
A sample of aliens can help leapfrog our understanding of biology, just like the study of terrestrial bacteria allowed us to precisely edit genes. Really interesting things happen biologically in extreme conditions.
(This estimate assumes that tidal forces are proportional to 1/R^3 and that the orbital radius of Venus is 73% of Earth's)
They were pretty clear in stating up front they have not ruled out abiotic processes, and are not declaring that they have discovered life. They state based on the known conditions of Venus and known chemical pathways to phosphine, and what is known about phosphine as a bio-marker, that life is a distinct possibility.
Through further research either we'll learn something new about Venus, phosphine production (which could improve our understanding of its relevance as a biomarker in the universe), or confirm some form of biological process.