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- The director general of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos stated this week that Venus is a “Russian planet.”
- “Resuming the exploration of Venus is on our agenda. We believe that Venus is a Russian planet, so we should not be left behind,” Dmitry Rogozin told reporters on Tuesday.
- Rogozin also revealed the country’s plans to send its own mission to Venus, in addition to an already proposed joint venture with the United States called “Venera-D.”
- The comments from top space officials stem from new research published this week, which found that Venus’ clouds could harbor microbial life.
- Visit the Business Insider SA home page for more stories.
The head of the Russian space agency has bet on the country’s claim to Venus, saying this week that it is a “Russian planet.”
Dmitry Rogozin, who is the CEO of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, revealed that the country plans to send its own mission to Venus.
This would be in addition to an already proposed joint venture with the United States called “Venera-D” that would include sending an unmanned space mission to the planet in 2026 or 2031.
Speaking to reporters at an international helicopter exhibition in Moscow on Tuesday, Rogozin said: “Our country was the first and only to successfully land on Venus. The spacecraft collected information about the planet; it is like hell there.” according to The Times.
“Resuming the exploration of Venus is on our agenda. We believe that Venus is a Russian planet, so we should not be left behind,” he added, CNN reported.
Rogozin’s comments come days after new research suggested that a gas on Earth called phosphine had also been detected in Venus’s atmosphere, meaning that the planet’s clouds could host microbial life.
In the study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, Cardiff University professor Jane Greaves and her team said their discovery turns Venus into a new area of interest.
“Our expected impact on the planetary scientific community is to stimulate more research on Venus itself, research on the possibilities for life in the atmosphere of Venus and even space missions focused on finding signs of life or even life itself in the atmosphere of Venus,” Seager said, according to CNN.
Venus is the second farthest planet from the Sun and is considered one of the hottest in our solar system.
The planet’s atmosphere is made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide and is the second brightest object in the night sky, after the moon.
The Soviet Union became the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on Venus in 1970. Venera 7 was one of many probes that were sent to the planet and became the first to transmit data from there to Earth.
Although it had a successful soft landing, it melted in seconds.
Its successor Venera 9, also released by the Russians, took the first and only image of the surface of Venus from a ground level perspective in 1975.
The country plans to send its own mission to Venus between 2021 and 2030, Rogozin said, according to CNN.
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