Sara Seager | The Morning Star Missions to Venus

The search for signs of life beyond Earth is a key motivator in modern-day planetary exploration. Scientists have been speculating on Venus as a habitable world for over half a century, not the scorching surface, but the much cooler atmosphere at 48 to 60 km above the surface. The concept is that Venus’ perpetual cloud cover might host life, as Earth’s clouds do. Many different decades-old Venusian atmosphere anomalies support this concept. The Venus clouds, however, are not made of water but are composed of concentrated sulfuric acid—an aggressive chemical that is toxic for Earth life. New lab-based experiments on the stability of nucleic acid bases, amino acids, and dipeptides in concentrated sulfuric acid advance the notion that the Venus atmosphere environment may be able to support complex chemicals needed for life and motivate the astrobiology-focused Morning Star Missions to Venus.