Wales finds life on Venus (maybe)

If, like me, you are Welsh, you are required, as a member of a small, mountainous and almost entirely rural nation, to have a good sense of humour, primarily so that you can laugh at your non-position in the world.

Yesterday, we suddenly all had to take ourselves very seriously, as Cardiff University made global headlines as they made known to the world their finding of phosphine in the temperate cloud regions of Venus - a potential inidicator of life floating around in that hellish planet's atmosphere.

Detection of phosphine needs further confirmation.  If it is confirmed, it might be a sign of bacterial life - or unknown chemistry that might take place in such a complex, extreme environment.
 

Of course, all the hype about life is very much premature.  The researchers have taken care to confirm their finding with two different telescopes, and tried hard - and so far failed - to explain the continuous presence of 20ppb of phosphine by various abiotic processes.  But there are still issues of weak signal levels and second-frequency identification yet to tackle before even the identification of phosphine, let alone life, can be fully accepted.

Living on top of an old copper mine, it comes as absolutely no surprise to me that bacterial life could be found in the clouds of Venus. Whilst that planet is much more severe than even the acidic waters of Parys Mountain, bacterial and even algal life is, nevertheless, abundant within the latter environment. 

In fact, extracting metals from low-grade metal ores using bacteria has been common practice for decades.

We have 'snottites', like those I photographed may years ago now - bacteria effectively protecting themselves from the harsh environment by producing copious quantities of biofilm.  Because the whole life cycle is based around sulphur, pH values in this environment are usually 1 or less.  When the acid emerges into daylight, algae start growing immediately in that water.

Bacteria also live freely in the blood-red acid water, deep pools of which you really wouldn't want to fall into!

Meanwhile, we have the amazing Russian Venera craft to thank for a lot of our knowledge about Venus - the only craft to successfuly make it to the surface and obtain data.  Note the lovely helical microwave antenna on Venera 9, below, making clever use of the aerobrake disk as a reflector. 

Venera 9.  Key features are: craft height of 2m.  Swirly 'top hat' microwave antenna (giving 512 bits per second upload to the orbiter, one camera on 122.8Mhz, the other on 138.6MHz).  Disk aerobrake, to slow the descent (without parachutes from 50km) to 7m/s on impact (entry speed was 10.7km/s) cushioned by the ring shock absorber, around which floodlights are arranged for the cameras.  The two tubes from the aerobrake to the body of the lander were for pre-cooling the instruments prior to detaching from the orbiter craft.  A gamma ray ('paint-roller') spectrometer is stowed beneath the ring, and would extend out on landing.  Despite temperaatures of 467 degrees Celsius and pressure of 93 bar, Venera 9 survived and took images for 50 minutes.

The alien world of Venus, as seen (perspective-corrected) by Venera 13.

 

                    Artist's impression of Venera craft on surface of Venus.

A dramatic impression of how Venera craft probably looked after not very long at all on the Venusian surface.