Venus favours the bold: Peter Beck's long shot at finding life

Friday, 6 November 2020

Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck believes we are not alone in the universe and has assembled “the best planetary scientists in the world” for a long shot at proving it.

In 2023, Rocket Lab will blast one of its Electron rockets on a 160-day voyage to Venus.

If all goes well, the rocket will release a spacecraft that will in turn drop a 37 kilogram probe into the Venusian atmosphere that will take 200 seconds to fall to the planet’s surface at a shallow trajectory.

During its descent, the probe will attempt to detect signs of life in the carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere of the planet, relaying data on what it finds back to Earth, via the spacecraft.

**READ MORE:

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* Astronomers see possible hints of life in Venus's clouds

* First New Zealand-made operational satellite sent into orbit, Rocket Lab says

* Rocket Lab: Peter Beck defends spy satellite work, ex-director speaks of leaving

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While Beck says he is not expecting Rocket Lab to find life, he is “expecting to try”.

“The chances of everything lining-up on one mission is incredibly low,” he acknowledges.

“First you have to get there – that is hard – you have to have made the right instruments to detect the right things and thirdly you have to be in the right place.

“You are basically sampling a very narrow corridor, picking up one grain of sand off the beach hoping to find a crab.

“But sometimes you can be lucky.”

That, of course, is if there is anything to find.

American astronomer Carl Sagan first speculated in 1967 that the clouds of Venus might be one of the few places in the solar system capable of sustaining life.

Interest in Rocket Lab’s mission soared in September when scientists using telescopes in Chile and Hawaii hypothesised they had detected the chemical signature of phosphine in the atmosphere.

On Earth, phosphine is believed to be generated naturally by the decay of organic matter.

Even though its possible detection on Venus has since been subject to considerable debate, the finding is one that astronomers are desperate to prove one way or another.

Beck says Rocket Lab – though a commercial business – has a duty to assist, simply because it can.

“What we are trying to determine here is to definitely prove whether is there life other than us in the universe and that is a pretty big question to try and answer.

“I think on the balance of probability you would have to say we are not alone,” he says.

“The way I view it is if you have the capability to meaningfully try and answer that question then how could you not?”

Beck says Rocket Lab has lined up contributors for the mission, some of whom will be contributing financially and others who will be providing support in kind.

The latter include Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Sara Seager and other scientists from Oxford, Cardiff and Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We are very lucky to be working with the very team that discovered phosphine so we are working with that group really closely to define the instrument that we are taking to Venus,” Beck says.

It will be those scientists, rather than Rocket Lab, who will make the key decisions on what will be on board’s Rocket Lab’s probe.

“I am the freight company; I will get them there with the best truck there is, but there are far smarter people than me working on that problem.

“Honestly, these are the most humbling calls I am ever on,” he says.

What is clear is that the primary instrument will be “purely focused on detecting life or the environment thereof”, he says.

A mass spectrometer tailored for phosphine measurement is an obvious candidate, he says.

There will also be a number of secondary instruments including an onboard camera and radio-frequency platform.

“Then there is the spacecraft itself. It will do a very close fly-by of Venus so we will get some data that has never been got before with such a close approach.”

Despite the collaborative effort, much of the cost of the mission will be picked up by Rocket Lab.

As a yardstick, a simpler mission that Rocket Lab is undertaking to put a satellite into a lunar orbit for Nasa is costing US$10m (NZ$16.6m).

“It is very lucky we have got a very supportive board,” Beck says.

But there could be a long-term payback for the Kiwi-founded US firm if, as Beck hopes, the Venus mission opens up a new role for private launch companies in conducting space exploration.

Beck says it would be wrong to think of the mission as a loss-leader for Rocket Lab.

But he says the company is hoping to “completely change the way planetary science is looked at and lower the barriers” to space exploration by filling in its current gaps.

Traditionally-funded planetary missions will still be needed but are measured in “decades and billions of dollars”, he says.

“I want to measure missions in terms of ‘millions’ and ‘years’.

“The way we iterate science in the lab is we set up and experiment then we learn and do another.

“For planetary scientists the best you can hope for is one mission in your career, so imagine doing one mission a year; we fundamentally change our understanding of the universe.”

Beck says he had an interest in Venus “before it was cool, because it has the ability to teach us so much about our own planet – it is basically Earth ‘gone wrong’ in a climate change event”.

“Irrespective of whether there was a commercial driver or not we would still be going to Venus, but when you fundamentally change the model for everybody, obviously there are good opportunities.

“I fully expect we will do this one then and then there will be a bunch of follow-on campaigns or missions after this.

“Even if we don’t get to Venus there is a still a private mission that has tried to get to another planet – and that moves the bar for what is possible within the industry.”