The first private mission to Venus will have just five minutes to hunt for life
Launching as soon as next year, Rocket Lab’s low-cost mission will be brief, but it could transform the search for alien biology.
By Jonathan O'Callaghan
August 29, 2022
As the covid pandemic raged in late 2020, all eyes turned briefly from our troubled planet to our planetary neighbor Venus. Astronomers had made a startling detection in its cloud tops: a gas called phosphine that on Earth is created through biological processes. Speculation ran wild as scientists struggled to understand what they were seeing.
Now, a mission due to be launched next year could finally begin to answer the question that has excited astronomers ever since: Could microbial life be belching out the gas?
