Moscow – If there is life on Venus, he can start learning Russian. The boss of Russia’s government space agency has claimed it as a “Russian planet”.
The bold regional claim comes at the heels of the scientist Research suggests life On Earth’s celestial neighborhood, the Sun’s second planet.
Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin, known for his awareness of unconventional scientific views – and for his often sarcastic anti-Western rhetoric – said this week that Russia wants to send its mission to Venus, in addition to a proposed joint venture with the United States. “Venera-D.”
Alexei Nikolsky / AFP / Getty
“We think Venus is a Russian planet, so we should not lag behind,” Rogozin, a former deputy prime minister, told reporters on Tuesday. He noted that the Soviet Union was “the first and only” to land a spacecraft on Venus.
“The spacecraft gathered information about the planet – it’s like hell there,” he said in a comment quoted by the Tas News Agency.
In research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, British and American scientists discovered phosphine gas in the clouds around Venus, which is thought to be a possible sign of life on the planet.
Venus’s atmosphere is almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide, and is considered to be the hottest planet in our solar system.
The new study renewed the public interest in Venus, possibly reminding the head of the Roscosmos of the achievements of the former Soviet Union of early world research.
NASA’s Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to fly through Venus and measure its surface temperature in 1962. The Soviet Union launched several “Venera” spacecraft, and in 1970 Venera 7 became the first spacecraft to make a successful soft landing on the planet. It dissolves in seconds.
Its successor, the Venera 9, took the first and only image of Venus’s surface from a ground-level perspective to date.
The space agency wrote on its website on Tuesday that the vast distance between the Soviet Union and its rivals in the Venus research contributed to the fact that the United States calls Venus a ‘Soviet planet’.
Shortly after the study was published this week, the Breakthrough Initiatives program, supported by Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner, announced that it would fund a study of the possibility of primitive life in the clouds of Venus, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Good Smugglers. Technology.
Last month, Rogozin declared Venus “more interesting than Mars,” suggesting that a study of the planet could help scientists understand how to deal with climate change on Earth.
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