- Roscosmos, director general of the Russian Space Corporation, claimed this week that Venus is a “Russian planet.”
- “Resuming the search for Venus is on our agenda,” Dmitry Rogozin told reporters on Tuesday. We think Venus is a Russian planet, so we should not lag behind.
- Rogge also announced the country’s plans to send its mission to Venus, on top of a joint venture with the United States called “Venera-D”.
- Comments from top space officials have come in the wake of new research published this week, which found that Venus clouds could shelter microbial life.
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The head of the Russian space agency is sticking to the country’s claim on Venus and said this week that it is “a Russian planet.”
Dmitry Rogozin, director general of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, announced that the country plans to send its mission to Venus.
This will be on top of a previously proposed joint venture with the United States called “Venera-D”, which will involve sending an emerging space mission to the planet somewhere in 2026 or 2031.
Speaking to reporters at the International Helicopter Exhibition in Moscow on Tuesday, Rogozin said: “Our country was the first and only country to successfully land on Venus. The spacecraft gathers information about the planet – it’s like hell there,” the Times reported.
He added, “Resuming exploration of Venus is on our agenda. We think Venus is a Russian planet, so we should not lag behind.”
Rogozin’s comments in the days following the new research suggest that Earth’s gas, called phosphine, has also been found in Venus’s atmosphere, meaning planetary clouds could shelter microbial life.
In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, Cardiff University professor Jane Greaves and her team said their discovery makes Venus a new field of interest.
“Our expected impact in the planetary science community is to stimulate further research on Venus itself, research on the probabilities of life in Venus’s atmosphere, and space missions focused on finding signs of life or its life in Venus’s atmosphere,” Caesar said, according to CNN.
Venus is the second farthest planet from the Sun and is considered to be the hottest part of 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. One of the many probes sent to the planet was Venera 7 and from there became the first country to transmit data to Earth.
Although it made a successful soft landing, it melted away in seconds.
Its successor Venera 9 – also introduced by the Russians – took the first and only image of Venus’s surface from a ground-level perspective in 1975.
According to CNN, the country plans to send its mission to Venus between 2021 and 2030.
