NASA / JPL-Caltech
Marina Koren, Atlantic
In June 1769, an astronomer named David Rittenhouse was preparing to observe a rare cosmic phenomenon, the transit of Venus. Rittenhouse had built an observatory on his Pennsylvania farm to watch the planet as it moved across the sun, a small black dot against the glowing sphere in the afternoon sky. When the moment came, « Rittenhouse became so excited that he collapsed and passed out and missed the start of the most important event in his scientific life, » writes historian Andrea Wulf. « When he regained consciousness, he quickly grabbed his telescope and found that Venus had already entered the sun, but calmed down enough to make some observations. »
Astronomers around the world are yesterday get into a similar state of feverish excitement. Fainting has not been reported yet, but just like Rittenhouse, they are overwhelmed by a new opportunity to experience our neighbor.
NASA has selected not one but two new spacecraft missions to explore the second planet from the sun to investigate. The missions – a probe that will plunge into Venus’ atmosphere and an orbiter that will orbit higher up – are expected to leave Earth by the end of this decade. All day long the astronomy community waited for NASA Administrator Bill Nelson to make an unspecified announcement about future missions, and when he spoke the word Venus, planetary scientists, to speak less than scientific, somehow lost it. There’s a spacecraft now in orbit around Venus – a Japanese spacecraft called Akatsuki – but NASA hasn’t sent a mission to the planet in more than 30 years. One mission would have been exciting, but two feel almost surreal.
The decision has been particularly satisfying for many planetary scientists, especially those who believe NASA overlooked Venus in favor of our other neighbor, Mars. In the past three decades, NASA has sent more than a dozen robots to the Red Planet. Where was the love for Venus?
After all, we owe a large part of our understanding of the universe to this luminous planet. It was Venus that helped prove the Copernican theory that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of our solar system. When Galileo saw Venus thinning into a sickle in his telescope and moving through phases like our moon, he concluded that the planet had to reflect sunlight on its orbit around our star. Centuries later, when humans began to send machines into the solar system, the first to reach another planet crash-landed on the surface of Venus in 1966. The first missions sent by the Soviet Union revealed an inferno of a planet with scorching temperatures that melted the spacecraft that managed to touch down.
Forgive Venus: It wasn’t always like this. Billions of years ago, the planet was mild and comfortable like Earth, probably with its own ocean, before its atmosphere inflated with heat-storing gases and its water disappeared into space. This story, combined with similarities between Earth and Venus in size and composition, is why planetary scientists refer to the planets as twins. But it’s not hard to see why NASA decided to focus on another sibling. Mars has a surface that won’t melt robots, and while exploration isn’t easy there, the agency is confident enough that engineers have managed to fly a first helicopter of its kind without crashing. For a space agency that has long promised to send astronauts to Mars, the attention makes sense.
Astronauts may never visit the planet, but Venus is one of the most exciting destinations when looking for life outside of Earth, the urge to answer these most existential questions. Last fall, a group of scientists announced that they had discovered evidence of a rare, smelly gas called phosphine floating around in the clouds of Venus. Phosphine cannot survive long in Venus’ acidic atmosphere, so something may have been replenishing supplies. The scientists suggested that the mysterious thing could be a chemical process that no one has seen before, or just some form of extraterrestrial life. On earth, phosphine is produced by microorganisms – why not on this other planet too? On Mars, ancient microbes could be petrified in its rocks, but on Venus, life forms could be floating in its clouds.
Since that initial discovery, other scientists have expressed doubts about the research – including whether phosphine is actually present. Debates like these tend to linger, and the phosphine discussion could still be ongoing in 2028, when one of the new Venus missions is set to kick off. (Note that scientists debated the presence of methane gas on Mars for 15 years before reaching consensus, and they still disagree on whether it is caused by chemical processes or living organisms hiding out of sight .) looking directly for signs of phosphine – scientists had already submitted their mission plans to NASA when the news broke last year – the probe that is supposed to dive into the atmosphere could possibly sniff something.
Venus is concealing many more secrets for the scientific community. The atmospheric mission, known as DAVINCI, will determine if the planet had an ocean as scientists suggest. The orbiting mission called VERITAS will map the surface of Venus in great detail and examine whether the planet has active volcanoes and shifting plate tectonics like Earth. « When we’re done, we’ll have a completely different view of it, » said Tom Wagner, a NASA scientist who runs the program that decided to fund these trips. « Children who learn about this stuff in 20 years will have a very different perspective on Venus than we do. »
The latest Venus news is understandably big news for space scientists, but the rest of us, who has little reason to contemplate the wonders of the universe in our daily life, one might ask: Why should we explore Venus? Why should we visit Io, a volcanic Jupiter moon, and Triton, an icy Neptune moon – the other destinations NASA was considering for new missions – or any worlds beyond Earth? Well, these places are all we have in a cosmic sense. We don’t have the technology to send probes to planets around other stars. We will certainly stay within the confines of this solar system in this lifetime and probably for centuries to come. Venus, Mars, the distant moons of the outer planets – these could be the most distant worlds humanity and its robotic explorers will ever reach. In a way, these are already the most famous bodies in the solar system; in others we are only just beginning to discover them.
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