• “Lucky” MESSENGER Data Upends Long-Held Idea About Venus’ Atmosphere (Johns Hopkins)

Understanding the interplay of gases in our atmosphere is hard, even here on Earth where we can measure pretty much anything we want. For world’s like Mars, we at least have rovers in multiple places to sample the air around them. With worlds like Venus – well, Venus likes to destroy things, so most of what we know has come from passing spacecraft, and even those are very rare. One way we can essentially get free data is to study Venus with spacecraft on their way to other worlds or to the Sun. One such mission was the MESSENGER mission, which visited Mercury several years ago. On its way there it used Venus’s gravity to adjust its orbit, and during a June 2007 flyby it tested its instruments by studying the great beige world of death. As reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, they discovered that the nitrogen concentration in Venus’s atmosphere increased with altitude.  Prior to this measurement, it had been assumed that the nitrogen was constant with altitude. This means we’re going to have to rethink chemical models of the atmosphere and how those deadly molecules that define Venus’s cloud cover may change as a function of altitude. This discovery is going into justifying the need for different proposed spacecraft both here in the US and in Russia.

What is particularly frustrating about this discovery is no one wanted to fund using MESSENGER’s test data for science. While the data was taken in 2007, it was only possible for team members to get time to do this research recently due to happenstance. Actual proposals were denied. This is a reminder that often people can’t work on projects as volunteers, and science funding is super limited and even the best data can’t always be processed due simply to a lack of money. We’re glad that this team found a way, and we applaud their determination.