Privately-Funded Venus Probe Will Search for Life in Clouds of Sulfuric Acid on

With multiple rovers landed and a mission set to return samples to Earth, Venus Life Finder Missions. “This is a newer, nimbler, faster way to do space science. It’s very MIT.”

The first of the missions is set to launch in 2023, managed and funded by California-based Rocket Lab. The company’s Electron rocket will send a 50-pound probe on board its Photon spacecraft for the five–month, 38-million-mile journey to Venus, all for a three-minute skim through the Venusian clouds.

A false-color image of the sulfurous Venusian cloud cover was produced using two ultraviolet channels from Akatsuki, the Japanese PLANET-C, and Venus Climate Orbiter, which highlights the convective turbulence of the planet’s tropical regions, in contrast with the clear, smoother polar regions. Credit: Daimia Bouic/JAXA/ISAS/DARTS

Using a laser instrument specially designed for the mission, the probe will aim to detect signs that complex chemistry is occurring within the droplets it encounters on its brief descent into the haze. Fluorescence or impurities detected in the droplets could indicate something more interesting than sulfuric Privately-Funded Venus Probe Will Search for Life in Clouds of Sulfuric Acid on