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The Venera Project: The Soviet Union’s Venus Space Missions · The Infographics Show Podcast

• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I was standing outside yesterday evening, just you know, watching
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: the sunset, and I saw it. Oh yeah, yeah, it's
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: always that first bright spark, right, the one that pops
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: out in the twilight before any other star, the evening star,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: exactly the evening star, and it's undeniably beautiful. It's named
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: after the Roman goddess of love and beauty.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: It has this whole romantic history to it, it really does.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: But as I was just staring at it, I had
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: this this sinking feeling, this realization that names can be
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: so incredibly deceiving, because if I could snap my fingers
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: and transport myself to where that beautiful light is coming
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: from standing on that surface.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: You wouldn't even have time to scream.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Not even a fraction of a second. It is the
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: ultimate cosmic catfish. We are talking, of course, about.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Venus, our celestial neighbor.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: And welcome everyone to beyond infographics.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, and I'm here to help navigate the turbulence.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Today. We're going to do exactly what the title of
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: this show promises. We are going way, way beyond the
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: stat sheets you see online. Yeah, you see those inpographics
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: on social media. Venus is this hot. Venus is this big.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Here's a size comparison with Earth, but that doesn't capture
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: the actual narrative, not at all. And the narrative of
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Venus is really the story of Earth's evil twin.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: You know, evil twin is a term that gets thrown
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: around a lot and popside, But in this case it
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: is frighteningly accurate.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: It's not just a lazy metaphorm.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: No, it is the central mystery of our solar system.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, think about it. If you are an alien
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: astronomer sitting a few light years away, squinting through a
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: telescope at our son, you would see two rocks that look,
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: for all intents and purposes, the same.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Right, because on paper they look like identical sibling identical.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, about ninety
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: five percent. It has roughly the same mass about eighty
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: one percent.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Of Earth's same density too.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Same density. It's made of the same rock silicates. It
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: formed in the same neighborhood, you know, out of the
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: same primordial cloud of dust and gas.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: By all reasonable logic, it should be another blue marble.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: It should be a paradise. It should have oceans and
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: continence and maybe even.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Life, and instead it is a literal textbook description of hell.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: It is the most hostile environment in the Solar System
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: that possesses a solid surface.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: I mean by far, Which is why I think today's
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: conversation is so critical. We aren't just talking about planetary
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: science and a vacuum here. This is a cautionary tale.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: Absolutely understanding Venus is absolutely crucial to understanding why Earth
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: remained habitable. Why are we here breathing oxygen and drinking
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: water while our twin sister turned into a pressure cooker
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: capable of melting lead.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: That is the big question. It's like a cosmic crime
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: scene investigation. Who killed Venus?
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: And the follow up question is always could it happen
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: to us?
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: Exactly? But before we get to the murder mystery, we
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: have to look at how we know what we know,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: because geek data from Venus isn't like driving a cute
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: little rover around Mars. Oh not even close. I feel
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: like Mars gets all the press because it's relatively easy.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: Mars is a vacation. Mars is a walk in the
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: park compared to Venus, Well, vacation. I love that. So
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: today we are going to dig into the incredible history
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: of the missions that actually touched the surface of Venus.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: We're going to talk about a Russian robot that was
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: essentially a titanium tank which survived being crushed and melted
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: for one hundred and twenty seven minutes.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Incredible story.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: We're going to talk about the first sounds ever recorded
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: on another world, which spoiler alert are absolutely terrifying.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: And we have some new science to discuss as well.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: There is new chemical evidence, specifically regarding water that suggests
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Venus might have held onto its oceans for much much
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: longer than we previously thought.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: Which just changes the whole timeline of the Solar System,
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: doesn't it.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: It fundamentally rewrites the biography of the inner planets. It
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: changes how we think about habitability itself.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: So subtlent and hey, before we descend into the clouds,
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: a quick request. If you love these journeys beyond infographics
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: where we really try to dissect the stories behind the data,
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: please take a second to rate the show five stars
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: on whatever platform you're listening on.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: It really does help other curious minds find us, it does,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: and it keeps us motivated to tackle these massive topics.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: Ideally, before the runaway greenhouse effect gets us all ideally.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, So let's start with the physical reality. In the research,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: this is often referred to as the atmospheric.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: Vice, a very fitting name.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: And when we say the atmosphere is thick, I don't
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: think people quite grasp what that means. Physically. We hear
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: the word pressure and we think of, I don't know
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: your ears popping on a plane.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: Right. It's hard conceptualized because we are used to air
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: being well airy. It's intangible. On Earth at sea level,
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: we are under what we call one atmosphere.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: Of pressure one at airm right right.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: And we evolve to handle that so we don't feel it.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: It's just normal. On Venus, the surface pressure is ninety
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: times out.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Of Earth nine zero ninety times.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: Okay, So if I'm standing on the surface of Venus,
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: and let's just assume I have a magic suit that
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: stops the heat for a second, what does that pressure
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: actually feel like? Is it like a strong wind? No,
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: It's so much more than that. It feels like being
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: crushed by a physical object. To get that same pressure
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: on Earth, you wouldn't just need to go into a
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: deep valley. You would have to dive into the ocean.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: How deep you'd have to go down about eight hundred
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: to one thousand meters a full kilometer deep in the ocean.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: A kilometer that's nuclear submarine territory. That's beyond where most
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: military subs can even go.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: That is crushing depth. I mean the kind of depth
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: that would implode a standard submarine like a soda can
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: imagine the weight of an entire kilometer of water pressing
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: in on you from all sides, all at once.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: That's what the air on Venus feels like.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: That is the physical force of the atmosphere on the surface.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: But here is the kicker, the part that makes it
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: truly hellish. It's not water. You are surrounded by carbon.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Dioxide ninety six percent carbon dioxide right.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: Over ninety six percent. And it's not cold deep ocean water.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: It is heated to four hundred and seventy five degrees.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Celsius, which is what in fahrenheit.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: That's nearly nine hundred degrees fahrenheit nine hundred.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: My oven doesn't even go that high. That's hotter than
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: a wood fired pizza oven.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: It's hot enough to melt lead, it's hot enough to
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: melt zinc tin two. If you dropped a penny, it
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: would just turn into a little puddle.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: So you have the crushing force of a deep sea
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: trench combined with the temperature of.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: A forge exactly. And because of that extreme pressure combined
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: with that extreme heat, the atmosphere at the surface enters
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: a very bizarre state of matter called a supercritical fluid.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack that. I saw that term in the notes.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Supercritical fluid. That sounds like something from a comic book.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: What is happening to the gas there?
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: It's a fascinating state of matter that we rarely encounter.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: It's technically still a gas, but it becomes so compressed
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: and so hot that the distinction between a gas and
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: a liquid starts to blur.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: It doesn't know what it wants to be pretty much.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: It has the density of a liquid, but it fills
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: a container like a gas. So if you are walking
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: on Venus again in our magic suit, you wouldn't feel
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: a breeze blowing past you. Oh no, you would feel
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: like you were wading through a slow, heavy current. It
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: would push you around like a tide in a swimming pool.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: So it's like a soup, a hot, toxic, incredibly heavy soup.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: A glowing semi liquid co two soup. Yes, it completely
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: changes how everything works, how things fall, how sound travels,
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: how rocks erode over time. It's a completely alien fluid dynamic.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: And you said glowing, Well, the heat is.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: So intense that the ground itself would likely have a
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: dull red glow like the coils on an electric stove,
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: and the atmosphere would scatter this light into a perpetual,
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: oppressive orange twilight.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: So that's just the surface. If you look up, we
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: don't see the sun, do we. We don't see stars, no, never.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: You might see a diffuse, sickly orange glow in the
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: direction of the sun, but you'll never see the stinct disc.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: And that's because of the clouds.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Right, Venus is completely shrouded in this thick blanket of
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: clouds that wraps the entire planet.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: A permanent global cloud cover.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: But again, these aren't the fluffy water vapor cumulus clouds
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: we have on Earth. These are something else entirely.
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, when scientists first realized what they were made of,
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: it was a real shock.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: I remember reading this and just shaking my head. They're
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: made of sulfuric.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: Acid concentrated sulfuric acid droplets, the same stuff you'd find
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: in a car battery, just floating in the sky.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: So does it rain acid?
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: It tries to, And this is one of the weirdest
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: weather phenomena in the Solar System. It does rain sulfuric
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: acid in the upper atmosphere at high altitudes, but the
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: surface is so incredibly hot that the rain evaporates long
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: before it ever hits the ground. It's a phenomenon called virga.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: You get these curtains of acid rain falling for miles
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: and miles and then they just sizzle back into a
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: gas about twenty five kilometers up. The rain never reaches you.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: That is horrifying. Yeah, it's a planet that actively tries
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: to dissolve you from the sky and crush you from.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: The ground and bake you simultaneously. It's the triple threat
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: of planetary environments.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: But there is a huge mystery in those clouds, right.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: The notes mentioned something called the unknown absorber. This sounds
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: like a nineteen fifties B movie villain.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, the unknown UV absorber. This is one of
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: the longest standing hohodunits in planetary science. It's a genuine puzzle.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: So what is it? What do we know?
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: Well, when we look at Venus invisible light, like with
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: our eyes, it's just a featureless, creamy white ball. There's
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: nothing to see.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Right, just clouds.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: But when we look in ultraviolet light, and we've been
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: doing this for decades since the Mari innermissions in the
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: sixties and seventies, we see these dark patches in the
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: upper atmosphere.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Dark meaning they are absorbing the UV light exactly.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: Something in those clouds is absorbing a huge amount of
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: solar energy. About half, maybe even more, of all the
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: solar energy Venus receives is being soaked up by this
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: this stuff.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Half the energy from the Sun. That's a huge amounts.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: It has a huge effect on the planet's energy balance
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: and its weather. We can see these dark patches shifting
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: and swirling. They move with the super rotating winds. They
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: change contrast over time, almost like weather patterns or algal
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: blooms in an ocean.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: But we don't know what it is. After fifty sixty
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: years of looking.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: We still don't know exactly what chemical species is doing it.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: How is that possible? We've sent probes through there.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: We have, and we have candidates. Scientists have proposed all
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: sorts of things, chlorine compounds, iron chloride, various allotropes of
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: sulfur like S eight or S four.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: But none of them are a perfect match.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: Nothing fits the data perfectly. The spectral fingerprint the wight
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: absorbs light at different wavelengths is just slightly off for
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: everything we can test in a lab on Earth. It's
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: a frustrating and fascinating mystery.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: And this is where the speculation gets wild, right right,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: Because on Earth, what's something that is incredibly efficient at
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: absorbing light?
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: Biology Pigments exactly, pigments. Chlorophyll absorbs light to create energy.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: Other micro use other pigments.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: So people look at these dark, shifting energy absorbing patches
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: in the Venusian clouds and they start to whisper life.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: We will definitely get to that later in our talk.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: But yes, that is where the life in the clouds
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: theory really takes root.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: The idea is that the absorber might not be a
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: simple mineral. It might be a colony of something. But
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: that is a very very big.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: If, a huge if.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Okay, So we have established the scene pressure of a submarine,
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: heat of a furnace, sulfuric acid clouds and a mysterious
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: dark substance swirling around. It sounds impossible to explore it,
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: like genuinely impossible.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: It's as close to impossible as you can get.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: If I were an engineer in the nineteen sixties and
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: my boss said go to Venus, I would look at
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: that data and say, let's just go to Mars instead.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: And yet we did it, or I should say the
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: Soviets did it. They made it their mission.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: This is one of my favorite chapters in space history,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: the Venera missions. I feel like in the West we
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: focus so much on Apollo and the Mars rovers, which
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: are a maze achievements, of course, of course, but the
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: Soviet domination of Venus is just it's heavy metal engineering
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: at its finest.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: It really was brute force engineering. The American approach to
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: space exploration, especially at the time, was often about miniaturization, electronics, finesse,
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: recision precision. The Soviet approach to Venus was we are
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: going to build a tank and we are going to
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: throw it at the planet until one of them survived.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: So they threw a lot of them at the planet.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: They did a whole series of them. An Earra four
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: of an Era five and Eur six. They all died screaming.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: They were crushed like soda cans before they could even
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: reach the surface.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: Exactly. They just fundamentally underestimated how brutal the atmosphere was.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: They kept building them stronger. They think, Okay, maybe it's
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: twenty atmospheres, Nope, crushed, Okay, maybe forty Nope. They didn't
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: know it was ninety.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine the morale in the control room
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: in Moscow. You spend years building a probe, you launch it,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: it flies for months and months across the Solar System,
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: and then you get maybe a few minutes of data
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: from the upper atmosphere and then crunch, silence.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: But that's the nature of exploration. You learn by failing.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Every failure gave them more data about the pressure profile,
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: so they could build the next one even tougher.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: And then came Vanera seven nineteen seventy, the first success,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: the first time a human made object had ever landed
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: on another planet and sent back data.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: The first triumph a huge one for the Soviet.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Space program, and the story Vaniera seven is incredible because
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: it almost failed. Right. It wasn't a clean, perfect landing, Oh,
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: it was.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: A complete mess. It essentially did fail, but in a
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: way that became a spectacular success. So after the previous failures,
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: they built this thing like a battosphere, like a deep
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: sea submersible exactly. It was a solid titanium sphere, incredibly heavy.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: They had to strip out almost all the science instruments
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: just to make the walls thick enough to survive. Their
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: primary goal was just survival.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Just get to the ground and tell us you made
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: it right.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: So they launched it. It hits the atmosphere, the heat
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: shield works, it survives the entry. It deploys the parachute
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: to slow but then disaster strikes. What happened The parachute fails.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: It either melts in the heat or the lines snap
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: under the strain. We aren't one hundred percent sure, and
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: the probe enters.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Free fall, so it's just falling like a rock from
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: miles up.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: It hits the surface at about thirty seven miles per hour.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: That's car crash ouch and then silence. The telemetry stops, so.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: They thought it was dead. Another failure.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: They thought it was another one for the scrap heap.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: For a while, the mission was considered a failure. But
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: and this is where the genius of the Soviet engineers
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: comes in and a little bit of cosmic. Look. There
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: was a glitch during the descent, a glitch, a mission
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: saving glitch. There was a mechanical switch, a commutator that
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: was supposed to cycle through the different data channels pressure, temperature,
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: wind speed, etc.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: So send a little bit of.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: Each right, but it got stuck.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: It got stuck on what.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: It got stuck on a single channel temperature.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: So instead of sending a complex stream of different data points,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: it was just screaming temperature, temperature, temperature, all the way down.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: So that's all it was sending. And because the switch
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: was stuck, the signal was very consistent and very strong.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: After the crash, the scientist went back and combed through
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: the hours of background radio noise, the static. They were
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: looking for anything, and they found it. A faint rhythmic
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: pulse hidden deep in the noise. Is Vanaro seven.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: It survived the crash.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: It had fallen on its side. The main antenna was
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: pointed the wrong way, but it was still alive, and
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: for twenty three minutes it just sat there whispering the
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: temperature from the surface of Venus.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: They gives me chills, a little titanium ball lying on
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: its side in hell, whispering four hundred and seventy five
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: degrees four hundred and seventy five degrees. And that single
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: piece of data was a gold mine because, as we
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: discussed with the supercritical fluid concept, in a gas, temperature
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: and pressure are physically related through the ideal gas law.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: So if you know one, you can figure.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: Out the other exactly. By knowing the exact temperature at
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: the surface, they could calculate the pressure mathematically with a
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: high degree of confidence. That's how we confirmed for the
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: first time that the surface was ninety atmospheres and four
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: hundred and seventy five degrees celsius.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: They save the entire mission scientific goals with a broken switch.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: That's the detail you don't get in the textbooks. Sometimes
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: malfunction is the only reason you get the data you need.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: It's an amazing story of resilience, both of the machine
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: and the scientists.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: So Vanera seven proved you could survive. That was the
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: proof of concept. Fast forward about a decade in nineteen
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: eighty two, Vanera.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: Thirteen, Ah, Vanera thirteen.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: This is the absolute peak, right, this is the crown jewel.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Of the program.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: Vanera thirteen is, in my personal opinion, one of the
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: greatest engineering achievements in human history. It's right up there
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: with the Saturn B rocket or the James Webb space telescope.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: That's high praise.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: It deserves it. By nineteen eighty two, they weren't just
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: trying to survive on Venus. They were showing off. This
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: lander didn't just have basic sensors. It had cameras, color cameras.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Collor pictures from the surface.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: It had a drill to take a soil sample. It
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: had microphones to listen to the wind. It had an
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: entire analytical chemistry lab packed inside a drill.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: They wanted to drill into the surface at nine hundred
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: Yes, think about that engineering challenge. You have to drill
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: into superheated rock at four hundred and seventy five degrees celsius,
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: where any normal lubricant would instantly evaporate and most metals
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: would expand and jam the mechanism.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: You have to do it fast.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: You have to do it really fast, because the lander
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: itself is cooking from the inside out. It's a race
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: against time.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: It was designed to last for thirty two minutes, right,
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: that was the goal.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: That was the design life. Thirty two minutes to land,
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: take a panorama, pop the lens caps, drill sample, analyze
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: the sample, and then die a noble death.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: And how long does it last?
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: One hundred and twenty seven minutes?
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: What two hours and seven minutes?
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: Two hours and seven minutes. It just sat there baking,
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: sending back data for four times it's expected lifespan.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: That's just a testament to how over engineered it was.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: It's incredible, and it sent back those iconic, haunting yellow
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: orange photos of the surface. You can see the slabby
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: basaltic rocks, the dark soil. It looks like a gloomy
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: day in a volcanic wasteland. It made Venus real.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: It wasn't just a number anymore. It was a place
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: you could.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: See exactly a real landscape.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: But we have to talk about the lens cap because
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: for all this brilliant, world class engineering, there is a
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: moment of pure slapstick comedy involved in the Venera thirteen.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: Mission, the lens cap incident. It's legendary among planetary scientists.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: So set the scene. The cameras had these heavy protective
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: caps to keep the lens safe during the descent through
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: the sulfuric acid clouds.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: Right, very important, and.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Once they landed. The plan was that pyrotechnic charges basically
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: explosive bolt would fire to pop the caps off so
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: the camera could see.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Okay, simple enough, pop the cap, take the picture.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: But there was another instrument on the lander, a compressibility arm.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: It was essentially a spring loaded hammer designed to swing
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: down and strike the ground to measure how how hard
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: or soft the soil was. I think I can see
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: where this is going.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: I think you can. The pyrotechnic charge fired, the lens
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: cap for one of the cameras popped off and it
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: landed exactly perfectly right where the compressibility arms programmed to strike.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you kidding me, I am not.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: The arms swung down with all its force and hammered
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: the lander's own lens cap.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: So we send a probe millions of miles through the
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: worst atmosphere in the Solar system to measure the compressibility
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: of the Venusian soil, and instead we measure the compressibility
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: of a piece of Soviet made titanium.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: We got excellent data on that lens cap. We know
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: exactly how hard that particular piece of titanium is At
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: four hundred and seventy five degrees celsius. It's probably the
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: most expensive materials science experiment ever conducted.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: That is tragic and hilarious all at once. It's so human,
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: even with the best planning in the world, sometimes luck
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: just isn't on your side.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: It is, but you know, it doesn't take away from
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: the triumph of the mission. Ven Or thirteen also gave
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: us something else, something absolutely haunting.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Sound, right, the first audio ever recorded on another world.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, this was before Mars, before the Huygens probe on Titan.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: We heard the sounds of Venus first. The microphones picked
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: up the wind, so it's a low, rumbling sound. I
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: remember the air is thick like a fluid. It doesn't
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: hiss like wind on Earth. It rumbles. It has a
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: physical presence.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Like a heavy bass note. You can feel in your
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: chest exactly.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: And you can also hear the mechanical sounds of the
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: lander itself. You hear the explosive charges firing the lens caps,
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: a sharp pop, and then you can hear the grinding
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: noise of the drill boring into the rock.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Wow. Imagine standing there. You're in this crushing, burning orange fog,
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: and suddenly you hear a pop, and then this mechanical
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: whirr as this alien robot starts chewing into the rock
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: next to you. It's just so eerie.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: It's the sound of humanity reaching out to a place
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: where we physically cannot go. It's a ghost in the
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: machine broadcasting from hell.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: I love that image. So the Viots went for the
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: tank approach land survive brute force. But the Americans, at
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: around the same time, we did something very different. We
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: had the Pioneer Venus project in nineteen seventy.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: Eight, right, and the philosophy here was completely different, almost
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: the polar opposite. The Soviets wanted to touch the surface to
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: conquer the planet physically. The Americans wanted to understand the system,
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: the whole atmosphere system. They called it the shotgun approach.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Explain that why a shotgun.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: Well, Instead of sending one big, heavily armored probe to
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: the surface, the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe Mission sent a carrier spacecraft,
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: a bus that released four separate atmospheric.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Probes at once, four for the price of one.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Sort of There was one large probe and three smaller ones,
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: and they aimed them at different parts of the planet simultaneously,
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: one on the day side, one on the night side,
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: one year the equator, one year the North pole.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: So they weren't all getting the same data exactly.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: They wanted to build a three D picture of the
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: atmosphere to see how it varied from place to place,
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: all at the same time.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: Plus the orbiter, can't forget that.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: Plus the Pioneer Venus orbiter, which stayed up there for
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: years mapping the surface with radar and studying the upper atmosphere.
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: It was a comprehensive assault on the planet's mysteries.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: I was reading about the development of this mission and
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: I found this fascinating detail about something called the Orange Book.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: It sounds very mysterious, but it's actually just a story
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: about really good project management.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: It is. The Orange Book was the planning bible for
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: the Pioneer Venus mission. In the past, a lot of
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: space missions were sort of driven by technology, like, Hey,
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: we have this cool new sensor, let's build a mission
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: around it and fly it and see what happens.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Technology in search of a question exactly.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: Pioneer was the other way around. They started with the questions.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: The scientists got together and wrote down twenty four specific
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: fundamental scientific questions they wanted to answer, like where are
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: the winds coming from? Or what is the detailed composition
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: of the cloud layers?
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: And the mission was built just to answer those questions.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: The mission was built exclusively to answer those twenty four questions.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: Form followed function. It was science driven engineering from the ground.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Up, and that led to some extreme engineering hurdles they
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: had to overcome. One of my favorite stories from the
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Pioneer Mission is the Diamond window property.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: Oh yes, this is a story that sounds like it's
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: straight out of a heist movie.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: It really does.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: So. The large probe had an instrument called an infrared radiometer.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: It needed to look out at the thermal heat being
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: radiated by the atmosphere below it as it fell. Okay,
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: but to do that it needed a window, and this
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: window had to do three impossible things. It had to
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: withstand ninety atmospheres of pressure four hundred and seventy five
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: degrees of heat. But, and this is the really hard part,
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: it had to be perfectly transparent to infrared.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Light, and most materials aren't right. Glass blocks infrared glass blocks.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: It Sapphire, which is usually a go to for tough
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: space windows, blocks certain key wavelengths they needed to see.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: They tested everything. The only material on Earth that had
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: the right combination of strength, heat resistance, and infrared transparency
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: was diamond.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: A window made of a solid diamond, but not.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Just any diamond. It had to be a very specific
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: kind a type IIA diamond.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: What does that mean.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: It's an extremely pure classification. It means the diamond has
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: basically no nitrogen impurities in its crystal lattice. If there
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: is nitrogen in there, it absorbs the infrared light and
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: the window becomes useless for the science they wanted to do.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: You can't just go to a jewelry store and ask
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: for a large, flawless, nitrogen free diamond.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: No, And you can't just order it from an industrial catalog.
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: It's too rare. The team at NASA actually had to
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: go to diamond dealers in London and the dealer told
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: them you can't just buy this, it has to show
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: up in your box.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: In your box, what does that even mean.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: Apparently, in the high end diamond trade, dealers get these
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: boxes of raw, uncut stones from the mines. They sort
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: through them. They have no idea what they're going to
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: get until they open the box. They essentially had to
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: wait for a diamond the size of a pokerchip, of
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: this specific, incredible pure to just appear out of the
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: ground somewhere in Africa.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: That is wild. The fate of a multimillion dollar NASA
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: mission was waiting on the chaotic luck of a diamond mine.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: And they got it. They found the stone, they had
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: it custom cut into a perfect window, and they launched
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: it into the Venusian atmosphere, a gemstone worth a fortune
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: sacrificed for a few minutes of data.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: That is commitment to the science.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: It truly is.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: And pioneer gave us incredible data on the atmospheric structure.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: But there is one specific mystery that comes from these
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: atmospheric studies that I want to pivot to. And this
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: is the big one, the ghost of the ocean water. Right,
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: because today, as it stands, Venus is.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: Bone dry, drier than the driest desert on Earth, I
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: mean astonishingly dry. If you could somehow condense all the
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: water vapor in Venus's entire atmosphere, all of it, you'd
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: get a layer maybe three centimeters deep across the surface
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: of the planet three centimeters. For comparison, if you did
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: the same on Earth, that layer would be three kilometers deep.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: That puts it in perspective. But the big question is
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: was it always that dry?
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: And all the evidence we have points to a very
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: firm answer. No. It used to be wet, very wet.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: And we know this because of a clever bit of chemistry,
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: something called the deuterium to hydrogen.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: Ratio, exactly the DH ratio.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's put on our lab codes for a minute.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: Break this down for us DH ratio. I'm not sure
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: I get this, because it really seems to be the
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: lynch pin of the whole lost Paradise theory for a venus.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: It's simpler than it sounds. Really. Water, as we all know,
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: is H two zero two hydrogen atoms one oxygen atom,
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: got it, But hydrogen has a slightly heavier twin called deuterium.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: It's an isotope. A regular hydrogen atom has just a
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: single proton in its nucleus. Deuterium has a proton and
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: a neutron, so it's about twice as heavy heavy hydrogen. Okay,
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: In Earth's oceans today, for every say six four hundred
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: normal hydrogen atoms, you have one deuterium atom. That ratio
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: is pretty much fixed across the Solar System for things
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: that form together. Now, imagine you have a big ocean
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: on ancient.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: Venus, the blue watery Venus exactly.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: The sun heats it up, the water evaporates, it floats
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: up into the upper atmosphere. There, intense ultraviolet sunlight from
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: the Sun smashes the water molecules apart, breaking them into
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: their component hydrogen and oxygen.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: And because regular hydrogen is the lightest element, it just
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: floats away into space.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: It floats away and it's lost forever. The planet's gravity
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: isn't strong enough to hold onto it. But deuterium, the
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: heavy hydrogen, it's twice as heavy. It's harder to lift.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: It tends to get left behind.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: So it's like if you hit a bowl of mixed
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: nuts and you started shaking it. The light little peanuts
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: might fly out, but the heavy brazil nuts would stay
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: at the bottom.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy over billions of years. If a
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: planet loses a lot of water to space, the ratio
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: of deuterium to hydrogen in what's left behind goes way
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: way up, the light stuff leaves, the heavy stuff stays.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: It's a chemical fingerprint. It's the smoking gun of past
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: water loss.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: And what do we see when we measure this race
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: on Venus?
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: We see a massive, undeniable enrichment of deuterium. The ratio
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: on Venus is about one hundred and fifty times higher
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: than it is on Earth.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: One hundred and fifty times. That's not a small difference.
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: It's a huge signal. It's unambiguous. It tells us that
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: Venus has lost a massive amount of water over its
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: history and ocean's worth at least maybe more.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: And there was some recent news on this, wasn't there
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: a study from Tuhoku University in Japan.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: Yes, very recently a study came out that reanalyzed some
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: older data with new techniques to get better resolution at
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: different altitudes in the atmosphere, and they found a spectacular
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: increase in the DH ratio at certain layers.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: The signals even stronger than we thought.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: It's stronger, and it's more complex. It suggests that the
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: water loss process is ongoing and that the original reservoir
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: of water in Venus is past might have been very substantial.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: Indeed, this completely changes the habitable zone discussion. We usually
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: think of the habital zone as this fixed place Earth
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: is in it. Venus is too close to the Sun,
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: Mars is too far. But you're saying Venus might have
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: been blue.
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: There are sophisticated climate models that suggest Venus could have
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: had liquid water oceans and a temperate Earth like climate
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: for a very long time. How long, perhaps two or
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: even three billion years?
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Wait, three billion years. Life on Earth got started about
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: three point five to four billion years ago.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: Correct If that model is true, and it is still debated,
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: I should say, but if it's true, Venus could have
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: been the first habitable planet in our Solar system.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: It could have had life while Earth was still a
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: molten rock or a snowball.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: It's a real possibility Venus could have had a billion
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: year head start on Us, and then at some point
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: something happened, a massive planet wide volcanic event, perhaps that
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: released a ton of CO two, a slow increase in
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: the Sun's brightness that pushed it.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: Over the edge the runaway green house effect.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: A runaway green house effect, the oceans boiled away, the
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: carbon that was locked in rocks baked out into the atmosphere,
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: and the lights went out on Venus.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: That is just so tragic, a lost paradise. It really
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: is a story of a world that had it all
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: and lost everything.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: It's the ultimate climate catastrophe preserved next door for us
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: to study, which.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: Leads us inevitably to the question everyone wants to ask,
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: if it was habitable for so long, is anything still alive?
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: The l word.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: We have to go there, and we have to start
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: with the weird stuff. We have to talk about the scorpion.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: Okay, the Venusian scorpion.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: We can't do a full examination of Venus without addressing it.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: So there was a Russian scientist, Lenid costum famiity respected guy.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: He worked on the Venera missions. He did, but a
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: few years ago he went back and looked at those
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: old Venera thirteen photos of the ones we talked about earlier,
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: and he claimed to see things, things that were moving right.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: He analyzed the sequence of images and he identified a disc,
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: a black flap, and something he described as a scorpion.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: He claimed they appeared in one frame and had moved
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: or disappeared in the next.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: A scorpion on Venus at four hundred and seventy five
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: degrees Celsius.
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: Look, I want to be respectful of the scientists, but no,
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: just no.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: So break it down. What was he actually seeing?
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: The disk he identified is almost certainly the lens cap
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: that we talked about earlier. It popped off and landed
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: in the frame. We know what that is.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's easily explained. What about the scorpion.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: The scorpion and the flap, they're artifacts, They're likely just
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: noise in the data transmission. You have to remember these
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: images are being transmitted over a very low bandwidth from
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: the nineteen eighties, from millions of miles away. There is
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: going to be noise in the signal.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: It's peridolia, right. The human brains tendency to see patterns,
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: like seeing faces in the clouds or the man in
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: the moon.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what it is. Our brains are hardwired to
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: find patterns in agency. We see a vaguely scorpion shaped
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: blob of static and we think scorpion. But from a
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: biological standpoint, life on the surface is impossible. Why complex
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: organic chemistry as we know it simply cannot exist. Protein's
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: dnature they fall apart. DNA and RNA would be destroyed instantly.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: There is no liquid solvent like water. It's not just
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: uncomfortable for life. The fundamental chemistry of life does not
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: work at those temperatures and pressures.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: So that the surface is sterile, dead, as adorning.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: As sterile as a place can be. But but there's
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: always a butt with Venus.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: We go back to the clouds.
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: The clouds are a completely different story. If you go
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: up about fifty to sixty kilometers from the surface, the
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: pressure drops to about one earth.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: Atmosphere, just like standing here, and.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: The temperature drops to maybe twenty or thirty degrees celsius
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: seventy five eighty degrees.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: Faar nerds in shirtsleeve weather. That's a nice day in
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: San Diego.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: Physically, yes, the conditions are surprisingly earth like in that
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: narrow band of the atmosphere. Now, chemically it's still very,
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: very acidic. You're floating in sulfuric acid haze.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: But we have life on Earth that lives in acid.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: We do. We have extremophiles called acid of philes, that
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: thrive in incredibly acidic environments like in volcanic vents or
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: mine drainage.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: So the hypothesis is, what if life started in the
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: oceans on Venus billions of years ago, and when the
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: oceans boiled away, the microbes migrated up into the clouds,
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: the only habitable place left.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: Are we looking at the last refugees of a lost
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: biosphere floating in the sky.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: That is the romantic and I guess scientifically plausible idea it.
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: Is, and it ties back beautifully to that unknown UV
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: absorber we mentioned at the beginning, the dark patches that
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: soak up sunlight.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: Could those be massive colonies of bacteria using the Sun's energy.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: That's the speculation. Bacteria on Earth use UV blocking pigments
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: to protect themselves. Maybe these hypothetical Venusian microbes are doing
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: the same, and we're seeing their blooms from our telescopes.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: And then there was the phosphine controversy a few years
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: ago that really brought this whole idea into the mainstream.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: It did a team of astronomers announced they had detected
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus and on Earth.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: Phosphine is almost exclusively associated with life anaerobic bacteria or
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: with industrial processes. It shouldn't exist on Venus through any
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: known geological or chemical pathway.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: It was a potential biosignature a huge one.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: But that detection has been heavily heavily debated since then.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: Right other teams haven't been able to confirm it, or
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: they say it was a data error.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: It's been a real scientific back and forth. Some studies
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: say it was a data processing error with the telescopes.
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: Others say it's there but in much lower amounts. Some
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: suggest it could be produced by some unknown form of volcanism.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: The jury is still very much out.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: But it opened the door.
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: It kicked the door wide open. It made the entire
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: scientific community take another much more serious look at Venus
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: and realize, hey, we need to go back and check.
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: We need better data, and we are going back. We are.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: After a long hiatus, really since the Magellan radar mapper
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: in the early nineties, NASA is finally returning to the
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: atmosphere of Venus.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: Tell us about the mission. It's called divin Ci.
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: Divin Ci. It's an acronym of course, Deep Atmosphere Venus
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging, and it's scared
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: ru for when the launch is planned for the late
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: twenty twenties. With the Venus entry happening in the early
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: twenty thirties.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: And it's a probe, right, we are dropping something into
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: that hellscape again.
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: We are. We're dropping a descent sphere called Zephyr. It's
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: basically a one meter wide titanium ball packed to the
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: gills with the most advanced scientific instruments we can build.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: It's going to fall through the atmosphere and taste the
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: gas all the way down exactly.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: It will measure the chemistry and the istopes with incredible precision,
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: a thousand times better than the pioneer probes could. It's
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: going to sniff the air all the way to the surface.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: What's the target? Where is it landing?
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: They are aiming for a region called Alpha Regio, and why.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: There what's special about it?
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: Alpha Regio is a type of terrain known as a tessa.
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: Tessae are these very ancient, heavily deformed, crinkled highlands. We
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: think they might be the oldest parts of Venus's.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: Surface, like our continents.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: They might be the remnants of the ancient continents from
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: back when Venus had oceans. They're made of a different
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: type of rock than the volcanic planes.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: So we are landing on a lost continent to see
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: if it was once habitable.
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: That's the hope. And the descent profile for this mission
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: is just fascinating. I have to highlight one detail that
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: just blew my mind when I read the mission plans. Please, So, normally,
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: when you land a probe on a planet like Mars,
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: you write a parachute for as long as you can
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: to slow down and have a soft landing.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: Right, makes sense.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: Zephyr is going to deploy a parachute to slow down
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: from its initial hypersonic entry, but at an altitude of
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: about forty kilometers still miles up about thirty minutes before
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: it even reaches the surface, it is going to jettison
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: the parachute.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: It cuts the cord. It just gets rid of its parachute.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: It cuts the cord and throws it away.
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: Why won't it just smash into the ground.
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: No, And this is the part that shows you how
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: alien Venus is. The atmosphere is so thick near the surface.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: Remember it's like a fluid that the probe doesn't fall fast.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: It settles. If it kept the parachute, it would fall
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: so slowly that it would cook in the heat and
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: its batteries would die before it ever reached the ground.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: So it has to get rid of its parachute to
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: fall faster, just to survive.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: It has to cut the chute just to get to
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: the bottom fast enough to take measurements. On the surface,
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: gravity is pulling it down, but the air is so
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: thick it's basically floating.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: That is just incredible. It's completely counterintuitive, like.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: A stone sinking in honey and the main.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: Goal of de Vinci is to answer that water question
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: once and for all.
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: That's the primary objective. By measuring the noble gases like
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: krypton and xenon and looking at all the isotopes, they
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: can reconstruct the history of the atmosphere. They can tell
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: us definitively was there an ocean, how big was it?
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: And when did it vanish?
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: It feels like we are basically CSI Solar system. We
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: are going back to the scene of a three billion
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: year old crime.
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: We are investigating a planetary murder scene. Who killed Venus?
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: And the unwritten question is always can it happen to Earth?
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: That's the subtext for all of Venus exploration. Venus is
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: the laboratory of the greenhouse effect. It's the terrifying case
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: study of what happened thans when a planet's carbon cycle
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: breaks down completely, we need to understand it to properly
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: safeguard our own future.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: It's a sobering thought, but it's also just an amazing
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: story of human ingenuity and exploration. From the first crushed
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: cans of the early Venor emissions to that titanium survivor
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: that listened to the wind, to the diamond windows of
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: the pioneer probes, it really is.
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: It's a story of incredible persistence against an impossible environment.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: And I think that's why we do beyond infographics, because
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: the numbers ninety atmospheres, four hundred and seventy five degrees,
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: they're just data points. They don't tell you about the
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: switch that got stuck and saved emission.
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: They don't tell you about the lens cap that got hammered.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: They don't tell you about the ghosts of the ocean
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: or the mystery of the unknown absorber. The story is
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: in the detail.
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: That's where the real understanding lies.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: Exactly so that is our journey to the evil twin.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: I hope you never look at that bright, beautiful star
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: in the morning or evening sky the same way. Again,
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: it's not just a light, it's a world a terrifying, fascinating, rumined.
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: World, a world with so many secrets left to tell,
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: a world waiting for us to return.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this trip to Helen Back, please remember
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: to rate the show five stars. It really helps us out.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: And a huge thank you to my co host for
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: guiding us through the chemistry and the chaos of Venus.
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: My pleasure. I'm just very glad to be doing this
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: from the comfort of Earth's one atmosphere of pressure.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: Aimen to that. I want to leave you, our listener,
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: with one final image. Think about that Venera thirteen lander.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: It's been sitting there on the surface since nineteen eighty two.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: The batteries went dead within a few hours. The electronics
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: are fried, the paint has probably been stripped away by
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: the acid. It's been through a lot, but the main
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: titanium shell is likely still there intact, sitting in the dark, hot,
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: crushing silence of Alpha Regio, a monument to human curiosity,
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: abandoned in the most hostile place in the Solar.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: System, waiting for Zephyr to come join it.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Waiting for company. Thanks for listening, everyone, We'll see you
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: for the next exploration.