(Web Desk) - The search for extraterrestrial life has long stirred the human imagination.
Now, a mission called Venus Life Finder, the first of its kind, is set to turn imagination into reality by probing for signs of life in the sulfuric clouds of Venus.
The private mission, scheduled for a January 2025 takeoff on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket, is part of the Morning Star Missions series and is spearheaded by Sara Seager, a professor at MIT.
Seager’s pioneering work, backed by a team that includes her son, Max Seager, challenges the longstanding notion that Venus’s sulfuric acid-rich clouds would be inhospitable to life.
Their research points to the possibility of nucleic acid bases, which are vital for life, being stable in such an environment. This work implies that life might adapt to use sulfuric acid as a solvent in place of water.
The mission’s primary objective is to detect signs of organic chemistry in Venus’s atmosphere, thereby providing further evidence to support Seager’s hypothesis.
Max Seager, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has made significant contributions to this research, with a particular focus on amino acids.
His involvement stemmed from a personal injury that allowed him more time to delve into this field.
The team’s findings have been published in scientific journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Astrobiology, the latter of which advocates for more extensive studies of organic chemistry in solvents other than water to broaden our understanding of the galaxy’s habitability.
The researchers concede that a definitive confirmation of life on Venus might necessitate a future mission to return samples from the planet.