Pissible Habitats in the Venusian Environment? How Can the Venus Payload Contribute?

Details Pissible Habitats in the Venusian Environment? How Can the Venus Payload Contribute? Pissible Habitats in the Venusian Environment? How Can the Venus Payload Contribute?

Dec 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agufm.p33a0224m&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #P33A-0224

Physics

0343 Planetary Atmospheres (5210, 5405, 5704), 0456 Life In Extreme Environments, 1060 Planetary Geochemistry (5405, 5410, 5704, 5709, 6005, 6008), 5464 Remote Sensing, 5465 Rings And Dust

Scientific paper

The Venusian conditions are unique in the solar system. Venus has a dense CO2 atmosphere, is volcanically active, and has plenty of energy sources such as light, UV radiation, volcanic activity, and chemical energy from atmospheric disequilibria conditions. Its surface conditions are sufficiently hot for sterilization and volcanism injects highly toxic gases which in the absence of unbound water can accumulate in the atmosphere. The Venusian surface is constantly regenerated by volcanism and any possible fossil record from early Venus history in which oceans existed on its surface is almost certainly destroyed. Its upper atmosphere lays bare to solar radiation with only carbon dioxide to act as a confirmed EUV filter. Any possibility of life was considered irrational before extremophile bacteria were discovered in dark undersea hot sulphur rich volcanic vents on Earth. However, some regions of the Venusian clouds might show conditions similar to the earth surface and could be a habitat of thermophilic microbial life similar to the one observed on Earth. A synergy between different instruments of the VENUS-Express payload, the SPICAV spectrometer and the VMC camera in a first step, and the spectrometers VIRTIS and PFS in a second step, will probe the actual environmental conditions of the cloud region. The SPICAV spectrometer, in particular, has three channels including, two infrared AOTF channels and could give access to organic signatures in both the UV and infrared. Given these observations we will be able to analyze whether the environmental conditions of the cloud layer would make it a possible habitat for extant microbial life. The instruments will shed answers to the availability of nutrients, water, types of energy sources, atmospheric dynamics, and organic chemistry.

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