Venus is hot right now.
I don't want you to think of the planet as a love goddess, but rather as a planet that is so hot it can melt lead.
Here is what is happening. Scientists are trying to figure out if Venus is a sanctuary for life.
Multiple research teams are developing missions that will address the planet's potential as an abode for alien life that could be swirling high above the scorched surface within the relatively warm Venusian clouds.
Life on Venus? It is not an absurd thought.
The call was made after a report was issued by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-led group that details a suite of privately funded missions to hunt for life on Venus.
The Venus Life Finder missions are designed to look for signs of life in the Venusian clouds.
The VLF missions would be a set of relatively low-cost efforts that can be launched quickly, according to the report. The MIT-led worldwide consortium studied the mission concepts for 18 months. The study was partially funded.
Scientists need to return to Earth a pristine sample of the Venusian cloud environment if they hope to address the Venus-life question.
The first VLF probe is designed to launch on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket, and it could be as early as 2023.
A small craft that carries an instrument package would fall into the Venusian atmosphere. The science goal of the fast mission is to measure various chemical abundances at different altitudes and confirm the presence of phosphine gas, a potential sign of life that is a topic of considerable debate in the scientific community.
Sara Seager of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences is the principal investigator of the planned VLF missions.
There are 6 most likely places for alien life in the solar system.
Seager said that there are still mysteries on Venus that we cannot solve unless we return there.
A detection of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus in 2020 was reported by Seager. On Earth, that gas is produced by biological and industrial processes.
The phosphine discovery has been challenged. Seager says that the phosphine finding made people more interested in Venus. She said that it allowed people to take Venus more seriously.
The senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute has been arguing for decades that Venus needs more exploration. He was a member of the MIT VLF study group and he flags several recent shifts that have pushed Venus into the spotlight.
The rise of exoplanet research and discoveries is one.
If we don't understand Earth-Venus differences in our own solar system, how are we going to determine what we are seeing in other planets? It was a shot in the arm for the Venus community.
New simulations of general circulation models suggest that Venus may have been hospitable to Earth-like life for a long time.
The implications are really startling. That is one of the new reasons to go there. It makes the history of Venus more interesting if true. It makes us want to find out if it is true. Venus could have been a great place to live. The mystery is now more intriguing.
There is a new respectability to the idea that there could be a zone in the clouds of Venus.
NASA and the European Space Agency announced new missions to Venus in June of 2021.
The first NASA craft to explore Venus since the 1990s will be called VERITAS, or Venus Emissivity. VERITAS will launch in December of 2027.
The mission will be launched in the late 2020s. DAVINCI will drop a probe on the surface of Venus after exploring the top of the atmosphere. On its descent, the probe will take thousands of measurements and take pictures of the surface.
Detailed observations of Venus will be made by EnVision. NASA is a key partner in the mission and is providing the synthetic aperture radar instrument that will make high-resolution measurements of the planet's surface features.
There is so much we don't know that I see the stirrings of momentum.
The attention Venus is receiving is comforting to Dyar. She chairs the Venus Exploration Analysis Group.
I think of it as where we were for Mars in the mid 1990s. We did not have a good map of Mars. We did not know what the geology was like on Mars. We were at the beginning of Mars exploration. We quickly checked all those boxes after all the missions were done. Venus has a lot to do.
The next thing that should happen in Venus islanders, according to Dyar. I hope that is the direction we go.
Is the community of Venus researchers ready to take action?
Dyar said that they are ready to use modern data.
Leonard David is the author of "Moon Rush: The New Space Race". David has been reporting on the space industry for more than 50 years. Follow us on social media.
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