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Assuming no abiotic pathway is found, what type of mission will confirm Venusian life? I imagine that everyone will agree it's way too dangerous to bring a samp
by stupendousyappi 6y ago
Assuming no abiotic pathway is found, what type of mission will confirm Venusian life? I imagine that everyone will agree it's way too dangerous to bring a sample back to Earth for analysis, so I expect we'll need to send microscopes to Venus. We'll also need to send something down into the appropriate cloud layer to collect a sample. Keeping anything aloft in the atmosphere will be expensive, so I assume that they'll separate those two elements of the mission, Apollo-style. So I expect that they'll send an orbiter containing the microscopes, and then a glider that collects the sample and then fires an engine to get out of the atmosphere and rendezvous with the orbiter (a helicopter would also be possible, but I expect it will be easier to get a plane back out of the atmosphere than to launch some kind of ascent vehicle from a helicopter). If they can design the sample capture mission to preserve the atmospheric pressure, temperature, etc. they might be able to get it up for analysis with the organisms still alive.
- rsynnott 6y ago> I imagine that everyone will agree it's way too dangerous to bring a sample back to Earth for analysis There’s always the ISS.
- sireat 6y agoI'd argue that ISS is a bit too close for comfort to Earth to be analyzing extra terrestrial bacterial samples. So a moon base or more realistically something orbiting Moon would be a better candidate.
- Buttons840 6y agoPeople come and go from the ISS, just as they do from labs on earth. Is the ISS really that different?
- rsynnott 6y agoI mean, people come and go to labs holding _smallpox_. I would assume the main risk of bringing back to earth would be landing failure, but just having the thing in a room doesn't seem like a huge risk compared with what certain labs already deal with.