[ad_1]
There can be life in the clouds of Venus, and Rocket lab wants to help find it.
The California-based spaceflight company, which gives small spaceship walks dedicated to Earth’s orbit, aims to go interplanetary soon, with a robotic astrobiology mission to the second rock of the sun.
“I’m madly in love with Venus,” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said on August 5 at a company update and Q&A session broadcast live on YouTube. “I am working very hard to put together a private mission to go to Venus in 2023.”
Related: Photos of Venus, the mysterious neighboring planet
Life in the Venusian skies?
Beck’s love stems in part from the lessons we can learn Venus, which he described as “Earth in a disaster due to climate change”. But a bigger motivator is the astrobiological potential of Venus.
Venus was a temperate world in the ancient past, with rivers, lakes, and oceans that may have lasted billions of years at a time. Then came the disaster of climate change: an uncontrollable greenhouse effect transformed the surface of Venus into a landscape of dry hell with overwhelming atmospheric pressures and temperatures hot enough to melt lead.
But life on Venus, if it ever existed, may have found refuge in heaven. Many scientists believe that potentially habitable pockets persisted in Venus’ atmosphere for long periods of time, probably in the present. At about 50 kilometers high, for example, temperatures and pressures today are similar to those of the Earth’s surface.
It is this aerial environment that Rocket Lab plans to target with mission 2023.
“We’re going to learn a lot on the way, and we’re going to have a crack to see if we can find out what’s in that air zone,” Beck said. “And who knows? You can hit the jackpot.”
Related: 6 most likely places for alien life in the solar system
Electron and photon
Mission 2023 will use both Rocket Lab stages Electron booster and Photon satellite bus. The 57-foot-tall (17-meter) electron is a viable option for interplanetary missions now, thanks to the recent advances in battery technology which enhance the performance of the Rutherford rocket engines.
With this improvement, Electron is now able to weigh up to 660 pounds. (300 kilograms) payload in low earth orbit instead of 500 pounds. (225 kg), said representatives of the Rocket Lab.
“It opens the Venus window, and it opens the recovery window,” Beck said. (The company works at recover and reuse the first stage of the electron. Return boosters will make guided re-entries into Earth’s atmosphere, which will require more fuel, which in turn will require more powerful engines to take the extra weight off the ground.)
Photon, which has yet to make its spaceflight debut, will not descend into the sulphurous skies of Venus during the upcoming mission. The current plan calls for the spacecraft to deploy one or more smaller probes into the planet’s atmosphere, Beck wrote in a Twitter message of August 4.
There’s no guarantee that life exists in the Venusian Clouds, of course, or that Rocket Lab’s planned foray will find it if it’s there. But the mission could be a game-changer for exploration regardless of the scientific return, Beck said.
“At the very least, I think it’s a tool of travel, even for a simple private mission, to try to go and do something interplanetary,” he said. “It sends a message to the rest of the world, ‘Hey, look – we can do these things in private.'”
The Venus mission won’t be Rocket Lab’s first foray beyond Earth orbit, if all goes as planned. The company recently signed a contract to pilot a NASA satellite on the moon in early 2021 using Electron and Photon.
Beck is hoping the duo can do quite a bit of needle travel in the years to come, offering low-cost, dedicated trips to a variety of far-flung destinations.
“Usually, if you want to do a science mission to the moon, you start writing a check for $ 50 million to $ 100 million,” he said. But with the release of Photon, “for $ 10-20 million you can actually do some really good science, interplanetary and lunar. That’s what excites me.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
[ad_2]
Source link