Venus Life Finder Mission Study
Sara Seager, Janusz J. Petkowski, Christopher E. Carr, David, Grinspoon, Bethany Ehlmann, Sarag J. Saikia, Rachana Agrawal, Weston, Buchanan, Monika U. Weber, Richard French, Pete Klupar, Simon P. Worden (for, the VLF Collaboration)

TL;DR
The Venus Life Finder Missions aim to investigate Venus' atmosphere for signs of habitability and life, focusing on unexplained chemical anomalies to address one of science's greatest mysteries.
Contribution
This study proposes a series of focused, cost-effective missions to explore Venus' atmosphere, building on past in situ probes and aiming to uncover potential signs of life and unknown chemistry.
Findings
Identification of atmospheric anomalies linked to habitability.
Potential detection of biosignatures like PH₃ and NH₃.
Advancement of private/public space exploration models.
Abstract
The Venus Life Finder Missions are a series of focused astrobiology mission concepts to search for habitability, signs of life, and life itself in the Venus atmosphere. While people have speculated on life in the Venus clouds for decades, we are now able to act with cost-effective and highly-focused missions. A major motivation are unexplained atmospheric chemical anomalies, including the "mysterious UV-absorber", tens of ppm O, SO and HO vertical abundance profiles, the possible presence of PH and NH, and the unknown composition of Mode 3 cloud particles. These anomalies, which have lingered for decades, might be tied to habitability and life's activities or be indicative of unknown chemistry itself worth exploring. Our proposed series of VLF missions aim to study Venus' cloud particles and to continue where the pioneering in situ probe missions from nearly four…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsPlanetary Science and Exploration
