Venus is often described as a hellscape. The surface temperature breaches the melting point of lead, and though its atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide, it contains enough sulfuric acid to satisfy the comparison with Hades.
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Radar image of Venus created by the Solar System Visualization project and the Magellan science team at the JPL Multimission Image Processing Laboratory. Credit: NASA/JPL But conditions throughout Venus' ample atmosphere aren't uniform. There are locations where some of life's building blocks could resist the planet's inhospitable nature. Among the rocky planets, Venus has by far the largest atmosphere by volume. So, while its surface is inhospitable, its atmosphere has regions that are the most Earth-like of anywhere else in the solar system. Scientists have wondered if life could survive in parts of the planet's upper atmosphere, and the discovery of the potential biomarker phosphine (though it was later disproved) generated more interest. One reason Venus keeps coming up in discussions around habitability is that it's accessible, whereas exoplanets aren't. Venus is easily reached, and we currently have one orbiter in place, the Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft. Three other missions to Venus are planned for the mid-2030s: NASA's Veritas and DAVINCI and the ESA's EnVision. Nobody is convinced we'll find life on Venus. But the planet can teach us a lot about chemistry and biology and their limits. In new research, a team of scientists tested different building blocks under Venus-like conditions to see if they can withstand the planet's perilous nature. The research is "Simple lipids form stable higher-order structures in concentrated sulfuric acid." The lead author is Daniel Duzdevich from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. The paper is posted on the preprint server arXiv now and has been submitted to the journal Astrobiology. Venus' surface isn't a candidate for habitability. But regions in its atmosphere may be. The issue is that much of Venus' sulfuric…