Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Space Science

Venus and Life 36

Posted by michael from the half-shell dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Venus-- thought in the 1950's by British astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle, to be covered in oil-- is discussed today by NASA's Principal Investigator for Planetary Atmospheres and Venus Data Analysis Program as having water in its atmosphere, and strange ultraviolet absorbers that swirl in the upper clouds. He speculates on the four ways that Venus might harbor life. Today's Cessna 182 crash led to the tragic death of the spacecraft manager for the highly successful Venus Magellan radar mapping mission, Gary Parker. The next scheduled Venus fly-by will be in 2004 and 2006 by the Johns Hopkins/Goddard Messenger spacecraft on its four-year mission to study Mercury."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Venus and Life More

Venus and Life

Comments Filter:

  • Mercury? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DarkKnightRadick ( 268025 ) <the_spoon.geo@yahoo.com> on Wednesday March 26, 2003 @02:27PM (#5598797) Homepage Journal
    "The next scheduled Venus fly-by [spacedaily.com] will be in 2004 and 2006 by the Johns Hopkins/Goddard Messenger spacecraft on its four-year mission to study Mercury."

    Will a spacecraft even last 4 years that close to the sun? Does it plan on staying on the "dark side" of Mercury?

    I mean, the article [spacedaily.com] says that "The frame for Messenger's signature sunshade - which will protect the craft and its instruments from the intense heat at Mercury - is due to arrive this week from GenCorp Aerojet. Layers of ceramic fabric will be added to the frame at APL over the next two months." but will that be enough? I mean it is the sun after all. I'd be surprised if it didn't fry as soon as it got within Mercury's gravitational field.

    • Re:Mercury? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by CheshireCatCO ( 185193 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2003 @03:41PM (#5599383) Homepage
      Of course NASA/APL/LASP has thought through this. The heat shield will do the job. All it has to do is relect the light, after all. The heat can only get to the spacecraft via radiation, so no convection or conduction. (Except a little done the heat-shield holding arms.) The bigger worry is Mercury itself. That chunk of rock is really hot, and the IR radiation coming from it will at some points of orbit be hitting the spacecraft's unshielded side. As I recall, the solution is to not do that for very long and then spend more time away from Mercury, radiating the heat away.

      • Re:Mercury? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Gilthalas ( 145182 )
        The above poster is correct, I believe. I don't work on Messenger, but from what I've seen and from this page [jhuapl.edu] Messenger's orbit is highly elliptical, with it's sunshield always facing the sun (duh) so the main components should have time to cool down why at the peaks of the orbit (i.e. when it is not looking at Mercury).
      • There's more coming off the Sun than light. The heat shield would need to be near-perfectly reflective to handle gamma radiation, but it would also need to deflect alpha and beta radiation, which are physical objects (alpha is usually a proton + neutron or two, beta is an electron).

        • Re:Mercury? (Score:4, Informative)

          by CheshireCatCO ( 185193 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2003 @11:43PM (#5603111) Homepage
          Pardon if I'm being daft, but are you thinking that this hasn't been thought about?

          Gamma rays ARE light and can be blocked by about a centimeter (or two) of a reasonably dense metal. And I'm pretty sure that the Sun doesn't give a lot of them off most of the time when it's quiet, being a blackbody peaking in the visible.

          Alpha and beta particles won't penetrate a metal heat shield of any appreciable thickness. Since Messanger will spend at least some of it's time inside of Mercury's magnetosphere (I'd need the specs on the orbit to figure out how much, or if it's the entire orbit) alpha and beta particles from the Sun won't be reaching it *anyway*. (The Sun emits electrons and *protons* in abundance as a solar wind. Not quite so much in the way of helium nuclei. But the solar wind doesn't penetrate the magnetosphere proper.)

          In any event, these things don't usually do much damage for their heat. They tend to mess with electronics by flipping bits and damaging the electronic substrates. NASA won't let them fly non-radiation hardened electronics. (In fact, all chips will probably have been tested on earlier missions nearer Earth.)

  • Duh (Score:4, Funny)

    by pmz ( 462998 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2003 @02:32PM (#5598845) Homepage
    Everyone already knows that Earth is the mating grounds for the Venusians and the Martians. Why speculate about life with which we are already intimately familiar?
    • Like it says in the banner: this is News for Nerds. Doesn't promise to be news to anyone else, like people familiar with that intimate stuff.
  • Well, this story reminds me what a nut Hoyle was.

    It brings joy to my heart to remember space-bourne viruses and the extra long nasal passages tree-dwelling monkeys have to defend against them.

    What this article really needs now is a creationist to start quoting Hoyle to prove that the chances of evolution happening are 1 in a gawdzillion.

    Hey, wouldn't a 'mozillion' be a cool number? We could make it equal to the number of ink droplets in the Library of Congress or something.
    • wouldn't a 'mozillion' be a cool number?

      Mozillion - The number of seconds it takes for Mozilla to start up.

    • Re:Hoyle, covered in oil (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A much better quote from Hoyle (more colorful) is

      A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing-747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? [Fred Hoyle(1983): "The Intelligent Universe", page 19. ]

      Sorry if it offends your religion. And his guesstimate was 1 in 10^40000 odds of life beginning on earth by stochastic means. Such an optimist he was.

  • Call Bush (Score:3, Funny)

    by AndrewRUK ( 543993 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2003 @03:19PM (#5599204)
    Quick!
    Call Bush to tell him that Venus has oil. That should get more funding for space exploration :-)
    Unless he's heard of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," in which case he'll probably start a war against women^W^W^W^W^W take action to liberate the women of Venus from an evil opressive dictator...
  • ...Fred Hoyle, to be covered in oil

    Mmmmmm, oily astrophysicist.... /Homer

    Dr Fish

  • I was thinking that this guy is flying his plane, crashes, and dies. A bad story in itself, but then when you factor in this guy was creating a revolutionaly mapping systems to explore other planets this one person takes on a much larger "life". Imagine if life, or even something such as water was proven to exist in our own solar system, but now because of a personal plane crash this won't be discovered for hundreads of more years? I have to stop thinking too deep as it gives me headaches....
    • ya, what's depressing is that the first thing i thought was that in these times any sort of plane crash is suspicious.

      anyone wanna bet that this was a 'wellstone-type' affair?

      na, forget it, we'll never know the truth anyway...

      call me paranoid, but anyone who says it can't happen has their head in the sand. i would rather call it healthy skepticism than paranoia... but either is preferable to being numbered among the 'sheeple'
  • Liquid water is nice, but not if it is dissolved in a chlorosulfonic acid rain.

    Sure, life can survive some pretty extreme conditionsi [thermal vents], but can it form there?

    • I'd say yes... we've found forms of bacteria that exist deep within the earth that actually feed on sulfur. If they can evolve on Earth, I think that such a life form can evolve elsewehre, too.
    • Conditions are thought to have been pretty harsh on earth when life formed here as well, so why not? And, from the point of view of creatures living near thermal vents, dry land must look "pretty harsh" as well.

      Besides, Venus may not have always been the way it is today.

  • Superrotation caused by life? 820 degree F mountaintops covered by life? I know he's probably trying to drum up funding, but it sounds like babble.

    • Since I know David Grinspoon, I can assure you that he is not off his nut. Please note the following:

      1. The quotes are from his popular science book, Venus Revealed, not a scientific paper or press release. Context is important. (And the original context is not the linked article, it's the final chapter of a popular book. Many authors have speculated wildly in their last chapters, often far more audaciously than Grinspoon did.)
      2. He explicitly says, several times in the chapter (I know, I have the book o
      • I thought 2 out of the 4 ideas were implausible. You think they all are. I might have worded things differently, because in my world being crazy ("off his nut") is not a pejorative, it is an asset. I appreciated Grinspoon's ideas enough that I responded by posting with my own kneejerk reactions to them. We certainly need thinking outside the box, but it is equally ok to point out how far outside the box an idea is.
  • is here [nature.com]. It's not overly technical but quite detailed. And no, this stuff is not science fiction or metaphysics, it is quite real.

  • uh... (Score:3, Funny)

    by eglamkowski ( 631706 ) <eglamkowski@nOSpAM.angelfire.com> on Wednesday March 26, 2003 @06:09PM (#5600572) Homepage Journal
    David Grinspoon says: First let me say that I am a big fan of carbon-based life. Some of my best friends are carbon-based.

    I'd sure hope so...

  • Life on Venus (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Muhammar ( 659468 )
    1. Strongly acidic media (diluted sulfuric acid) is not a big deal: there are microbs on Earth that thrive in diluted sulfuric acid (like pH=0) 2. Strong UV is bigger problem: enegetic UV is enormously destructive to carbon-based life 3. Some moisture is probably needed, and there is not much of it in the clouds in liquid form 4. The strongly UV-absorbing material in clouds can very easily be a mixture of sulfurous compounds: The products formed in system H2S + SO2 + S (irradiated by UV) are qute complex

  • Look at it scientifically (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sifersdomain ( 661871 ) <sifer_hackemup@hotmail.com> on Thursday March 27, 2003 @12:10AM (#5603419) Homepage
    Anything can exist anywhere. As long as they have adapted to there living environment. It is possible that a chunk on rock with small traces of life on it could have been projected off earth and landed on Venus; the life form evolves and adapts to the radiation and heat allowing it to live in that what we think of harsh conditions. Then, as for the resources it would need to survive, it is possible that it could adapt to live off the heat or to live off even oil.
    • Anything can exist anywhere

      This is a bit sweeping. Let's try: "Liquid helium. Center of the sun." No.

      Life can exist in a wide variety of environments, possibly even including the upper atmosphere of Venus. But I would give very long odds on a bet that the surface is anything but sterile.

      • So you think that is imposable for life forms to live in places where it seems too imposable for life forms to live in. Well, if you do not look at it in the perspective that you are currently looking at it in, you can see that anything is possible, and for all we know, we could be the atoms in the body of an extremely large organism that thinks that we do not exist. They when you think of that, you can see that it is also possible that that organism is just an atom of another much larger than it. In a neve

  • What is life? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by clambake ( 37702 ) on Thursday March 27, 2003 @03:13AM (#5604714) Homepage
    I think the reason why Venus sounds like such an incredibly bad place to find life is that a lot of us consider "life" to be humans and ducks and such. What is the core of life? Life is just a very complex machine for converting stuff to energy and then using that energy to do stuff. Venus has tons and tons of energy just hanging around. Life on Venus wouldn't need to eat, it could just sit there and absorb all the 800 degree goodness in little bio-capacitors. If it did eat, it wouldn't have to spend any time creating digestive juices, it could just open it's mouth when it rained. For us, Venus would suck, but for life adapted to Venus, it would be paradise.
    • Life on Venus wouldn't need to eat, it could just sit there and absorb all the 800 degree goodness in little bio-capacitors.

      Didn't pay much attention in Thermodynamics class, did we?

Slashdot Top Deals

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

Close