A team of planetary scientists has proposed a hypothetical life cycle that could allow microbes to survive on Venus by migrating between different atmospheric layers.
Cloud-borne microbes are not unprecedented in the solar system. “On our own Earth, we also have what we call an aerial biosphere,” Seager tells. “[Microbes] from Earth get upswept and they float around. They get inside droplets and the wind carries them across entire continents and oceans.”
Without a droplet protecting the hypothetical microbes, they would then go through a metabolic transformation and enter a protective dormant state to survive the extreme heat and dehydration. These dormant microbes, which the researchers refer to as ‘spores,’ could then persist, suspended in Venus’ lower haze layer.Eventually, Venus’ atmospheric updrafts would blow the spores back up into the planet’s temperate cloud layers, where they would be rehydrated, reviving them to an active state.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a professor at Technical University Berlin who was not involved in the research but studies habitability on Venus, says that one possible approach to looking forwould be a fly-over mission, where a spacecraft travels through the lower cloud layers and sucks up samples. These could then be evaluated remotely to see if they contain any intriguing organic molecules.
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