so this is lit as shit. theyre saying there is a source of PH3 in the atmosphere of venus, an atmosphere which rarely has any sort of bond containing hydrogen. this implies it could be life.
however, they also mentioned it appearing near the equator. and that made me remember some articles about phosphine in comets and some others about how asteroids tend to hit our equator more. how much yall wanna reckon a giant comet hit that motherfucker many years back and had ph3 in it? they say that the phosphine would deplete in 10^3 years if it is not renewed, i didnt see any info on whether the concentration changed in their year of observation
here's their bit on anomalous events, which doesnt seem to mention asteroids or comets:
Energetic events are also not an effective route to making PH3. Lightning may occur on Venus, but at sub-Earth activity levels33. We find that PH3 production by Venusian lightning would fall short of few-ppb abundance by factors of 107 or more. Similarly, there would need to be >200 times as much volcanic activity on Venus as on Earth to inject enough PH3 into the atmosphere (up to ~108 times, depending on assumptions about mantle rock chemistry). Orbiter topographical studies have suggested there are not many large, active, volcanic hotspots on Venus34. Meteoritic delivery adds at most a few tonnes of phosphorus per year (for Earth-like accretion of meteorites). Exotic processes such as large-scale tribochemical (frictional) processes and solar wind protons also only generate PH3 in negligible quantities (W. Bains et al., manuscript in preparation, submitted to Astrobiology as ‘Phosphine on Venus cannot be explained by conventional processes'; also see Extended Data Fig. 10).
i do like that theyre going for the gold and asking for a new visit to venus and some new telescopes though.
I love this shit. Space stuff is amazing, and I'd love to see a mission sent there to retrieve some samples and return to Earth.
Building telescopes and sending new missions? This is a perfect use of NASA and our research establishment.
Literally like 3-4 steps from being impossible. We need like 100+m rockets just to get into earth orbit. You'd have to move an entire rocket like that to Venus. And thats ignoring the fact that Venus atmosphere is thicc af which would need even more fuel to get off Venus
EDIT: actually now that I think of it you could do some kind of balloon that picks the samples into high altitude and then have some kind of spaceplane pick it up mid air (like what CIAs corona program did, but with a space plane instead of a regular one). Still an insane feat tho
the biggest reason we need giant rockets isn't to get into space - it's to get enough speed to stay in space. we can launch a rocket towards venus, have it collect atmospheric samples in the upper atmosphere at 10,000 miles an hour, and then loop around and come back to earth using barely any fuel in the process (relative to the amount it took to launch off earth).
Ahh, you're thinking that way. My mind went to soil samples. If it's only atmospheric samples then yeah, ez pz in comparison
Oh, I apologise, I wasn't clear. I would think an atmospheric scoop would be enough, since that seems to be where these things are, but I absolutely didn't say that in my initial post.
A lander would be real tough given Venus's atmosphere!
It's really all about finding more efficient fuels. If you can find a fuel that we can accelerate out of a rocket at incredibly high speeds, we could dramatically decrease the launch mass of any given rocket. That's specific impulse, baybee. Plus, given a large enough budget, there could also be the possibility of launching parts of a rocket to LEO and assembling them, which makes getting a payload of a spaceplane with the necessary equipment for this mission a lot more feasible, but maybe I'm a little bit KSP-brained.
You could theoretically pull this maneuver with a normal atmospheric entry vehicle by taking advantage of boost-gliding (aka skip reentry). Basically, objects entering the atmosphere of a planet will exhibit different behaviors based on their speed, shape and trajectory, as well as the atmospheric density and gravitational field of the planet. In the specific case of an object with a large flat surface (eg. a spacecraft with a heat shield) entering at a shallow angle and at high speeds, it will tend to gain enough lift from the atmosphere that it actually ricochets back out into space. This would be more fuel efficient than a plane since it could be done entirely using ballistics (except at the terminal phase of the maneuver where the spacecraft may need to expend fuel in order to keep itself in orbit due to speed lost due to air friction) , but it does also mean that the collection would have to occur at extreme altitudes and speeds which could make it very impractical or even dangerous.