![]() The Stargazer has been in development since Venus Aerospace was founded in 2020 by Sarah “Sassie” Duggleby and Dr. It is designed to travel at Mach 9 taking passengers to the other side of the world in one hour. The hypersonic aircraft will take off from a conventional airport, then climb to the edge of space. The Texas-based company unveiled its first design vehicle at UP.Summit, a three-day, invitation-only gathering of mobility innovators across air, sea, ground, and space being held this week in Bentonville, Arkansas. DAVINCI will carry a descent probe, which will study the Venusian atmosphere up close as it plunges through it.Venus Aerospace has a conceptual design for its hypersonic space plane known as Stargazer. For example, two NASA missions, called VERITAS and DAVINCI, and Europe's EnVision orbiter are scheduled to launch toward the planet in the next decade. The debate could be settled in the not-too-distant future, for Venus has emerged as a planetary science and astrobiology priority. And these new findings from Greaves and her team are likely to prompt even more follow-up investigations. The potential detection sparked a flurry of follow-up research, some of which was conducted by teams consisting of scientists involved in the initial phosphine detection, that failed to turn up the molecule. "Astonishingly, we found it, and all hell broke loose!" "I vaguely remembered Venus is supposed to have this potential habitat in the high clouds, which is anaerobic, and we eventually got telescope time, so I thought, 'Why don’t we have a very quick look and see if there’s some phosphates in Venus clouds, an analog to things living on the surface of the Earth?'" Greeaves said. She said the decision to investigate Venus resulted from the study of other solar system worlds like Saturn and improved telescope technology that allowed for the probing of the atmospheres of smaller planets. She reflected on how the search for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus was prompted and how that led to the 2020 situation. ![]() Greaves may be wary of sparking a furor like the one that resulted from the initial detection of phosphine by her team three years ago. "There’s a big school of thought that you can make phosphine by lobbing phosphorus-bearing rocks up into the high atmosphere and kind of eroding them with water and acid and stuff and getting phosphine gas," Greaves said during her talk. Abiotic processes, some of which we don't fully understand, could also be generating the stuff on Venus. However, even if there is phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere, it doesn't necessarily mean the planet hosts life. And the thought of life on Earth's "sister planet" isn't as far-out as you might think: While Venus' surface is incredibly inhospitable, reaching temperatures around 900 degrees Fahrenheit (475 degrees Celsius), conditions about 30 miles (50 kilometers) up in the clouds are much more temperate and Earth-like. That's why the putative Venus phosphine find caused such a stir three years ago. This suggests that phosphine, if detected on other worlds, is a potential biosignature. She explained that phosphine is generally not made in other ways on our planet, as Earth lacks an abundance of "loose" hydrogen. Greaves said that, on Earth, phosphine is generated by microorganisms living in a very low-oxygen environment.
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