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Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars with his rocket company SpaceX. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wants a billion people living in space. But the CEO of a private space company is approaching space exploration differently, and now intends to participate in the search for life on Venus.
On Monday, scientists announced the astonishing discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. This chemical could have been produced by a biological source, but scientists won’t know for sure without sending a spacecraft to the planet.
Luckily, Rocket Lab, the small private rocket company founded in New Zealand, has been working on that mission. The company has developed a small satellite, called Photon, which it plans to launch on its own Electron rocket starting in 2023.
“This mission is to go see if we can find life,” said Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. “Obviously, this discovery of phosphine really adds strength to that possibility. So I think we have to go and take a look there. “
Rocket Lab has launched a dozen rockets into space, putting small satellites for private companies, NASA and the US military into orbit. It also has a mission to the moon in the works with NASA, called CAPSTONE, scheduled to launch in early 2021.
The company began investigating the possibility of a mission to Venus earlier this year, before learning of the phosphine discovery. Although its Electron rocket is much smaller than those used by SpaceX and other competitors, it could send a space probe to Venus.
The company’s plan is to develop the mission in-house and, for the most part, self-finance it, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. You are looking for other partners to bear the cost. The Photon spacecraft, a small 660-pound satellite that had its first test flight in orbit this month, it would launch when Earth and Venus lined up for the shortest trip, and it would get there in several months.
The spacecraft will be designed to fly past Venus and take measurements and images, rather than going into orbit. But it will be able to launch a small probe that weighs 82 pounds into the planet’s atmosphere, taking readings and looking for more evidence of life.
The probe would enter the atmosphere at about 6 miles per second, Beck said, falling through the skies of Venus without a parachute. As it travels through the region of the atmosphere where phosphine was discovered and microbial life might be in the air, it would take readings and send them back to Earth via the Photon spacecraft before being destroyed.
Rocket Lab is working with scientists on what science instruments the probe and spacecraft might carry, including Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the researchers involved in the phosphine discovery. Although the probe could probably only carry a single instrument, there is a lot it could accomplish.
Dr Seager said they could probably put an infrared spectrometer or “some kind of gas analyzer” on board to confirm the presence of phosphine and measure other gases.
“Looking for other gases that are not expected could also be a sign of life,” he said.
Dr. Seager is also part of a team working with Breakthrough Initiatives, which is funded by Yuri Milner, the Russian investor. Over the next six months, his team will study what kinds of small, medium and large missions could be sent to Venus in the near future to search for life.
Rocket Lab’s modest mission is limited in what it can accomplish. The probe won’t survive long and probably won’t have a chamber, which means its scientific return will be short-lived even if it is significant.
NASA is considering a couple of larger missions to Venus, one called DAVINCI +, the other VERITAS, and each would have many more capabilities.
“When you spend 100 times more on a payload, you’ll get more science out of it,” said Colin Wilson of the University of Oxford, who is part of a proposed European orbiter for Venus called EnVision that aims to launch in 2032.
The trade-off, however, is speed. Rocket Lab could quickly develop its mission and be ready to launch years before government space agencies. And while its small mission may lack sophisticated capabilities, it would become the first mission designed to enter Venus’s atmosphere since the Soviet Union’s Vega 2 in 1985, providing important new data.
“There’s so much good science to do that we can’t do it all,” said Mark McCaughrean, ESA’s senior adviser for science and exploration. “So if other players come in and say we can go and do this, I don’t see a problem with that.”
With yesterday’s phosphine announcement, the Rocket Lab mission now has the exciting prospect of contributing to a major scientific discovery and changing the way researchers conduct planetary exploration. NASA sent astronauts to the Moon. SpaceX wants to bring humans to Mars. Is Rocket Lab betting on Venus?
“No,” Beck said, laughing. “Venus is tremendously attractive. But when it comes to claiming planets, that’s not what interests me. “
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