- MIT researchers plan to go for private missions to search for the life existence on Venus. Researchers revealed the details regarding the Venus Life Finder (VLF).
- The team is looking for life on Venus because of the chemical abnormalities that create habitable temperatures on cloud layers.
In an upcoming private space exploration project, Venus Life Finder, the mission aims to determine whether the Earth’s hothouse twin has life or not.
According to The Jerusalem Post, MIT scientists will lead Venus Life Finder, which is intended to be a series of multiple missions. A member of the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Department at MIT leads this project.
Visit the website Venus Cloud Life for more information about the mission, whose title already describes the project’s main objective: to search for signs of life in Venus’ clouds.
It is also worth noting that since the missions are privately funded, they will not be associated with big names like NASA or SpaceX. They will work with Rocket Lab to launch the probe, which will use the Electron rocket to launch the probe into orbit by 2023.
In the probe itself, an instrument will use lasers to detect whether the thick clouds of Venus contain any ‘complex chemistry.’ Using lasers, these samples will be checked for fluorescence or impurities, which may indicate that microbial life is present at the very least.
However, there has already been a significant delay to this mission. According to information on the website, a probe was originally scheduled to launch last December 12th and arrive at Venus by January 29th next year.
Afterward, 2023 as the new launch date was selected, with June 9th as the intended launch date. To reach Earth’s “twin,” the space probe will need more than a year.
The probe will only skim through the clouds for 3 minutes once it reaches the planet after traveling 38 million miles. Venus Life Finder plans to make numerous visits to the planet during the next few years.
