Venus Life Finder Missions Motivation and Summary

Creators: Seager, Sara; Petkowski, Janusz J.; Carr, Christopher E.; Grinspoon, David H.; Ehlmann, Bethany L.; Saikia, Sarag J.; Agrawal, Rachana; Buchanan, Weston P.; Weber, Monika U.; French, Richard; Klupar, Pete; Worden, Simon P.; Baumgardner, Darrel; Venus Life Finder Mission Team

Abstract

Finding evidence of extraterrestrial life would be one of the most profound scientific discoveries ever made, advancing humanity into a new epoch of cosmic awareness. The Venus Life Finder (VLF) missions feature a series of three direct atmospheric probes designed to assess the habitability of the Venusian clouds and search for signs of life and life itself. The VLF missions are an astrobiology-focused set of missions, and the first two out of three can be launched quickly and at a relatively low cost. The mission concepts come out of an 18-month study by an MIT-led worldwide consortium.

Additional Information

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Received: 7 June 2022 / Revised: 7 July 2022 / Accepted: 13 July 2022 / Published: 18 July 2022. (This article belongs to the Special Issue The Search for Signs of Life on Venus: Science Objectives and Mission Designs) We thank the extended Venus Life Finder Mission team for useful discussions. List of the individuals involved as the VLF extended Venus Life Finder Mission team can be found here: https://venuscloudlife.com/, accessed on 14 May 2022. This research was partially funded by Breakthrough Initiatives, the Change Happens Foundation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Author Contributions. Conceptualization, S.S., J.J.P., C.E.C., D.H.G., B.L.E., S.J.S., R.A., W.P.B., M.U.W., R.F., P.K., S.P.W., D.B.; writing—original draft preparation, S.S., J.J.P.; writing—review and editing, S.S., J.J.P., C.E.C., D.H.G., B.L.E., S.J.S., R.A., W.P.B., M.U.W., R.F., P.K., S.P.W., D.B., Venus Life Finder Mission Team; All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. The authors declare no conflict of interest. Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable. Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable. Data Availability Statement: Not applicable.

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