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DAVINCI mission to Venus
by
catdlr
on 02 Jun, 2021 23:31
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NASA Goddard
Posted: June 2, 2021
NASA has selected the DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble-gases, Chemistry and Imaging +) mission as part of its Discovery program, and it will be the first spacecraft to enter the Venus atmosphere since NASA’s Pioneer Venus in 1978 and USSR’s Vega in 1985.
Named for visionary Renaissance artist and scientist, Leonardo da Vinci, the DAVINCI+ mission will bring 21st-century technologies to the world next door. DAVINCI+ may reveal whether Earth’s sister planet looked more like Earth’s twin planet in a distant, possibly hospitable past with oceans and continents.
The mission combines a spacecraft, developed by Lockheed-Martin, and a descent probe, developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The spacecraft will map the cloud motions and surface composition of mountainous regions, including the Australia-sized Ishtar Terra. The descent probe will take a daring hour-long plunge through the massive and largely unexplored atmosphere to the surface, making detailed measurements of the atmosphere and surface the whole way down. These measurements include atmospheric samples and images that will allow scientists to deduce the planet’s history, its possible watery past, and trace gases as fingerprints of the planet’s inner workings. The probe will descend over Alpha Regio, an intriguing highland terrain known as a “tessera” standing nearly 10,000 feet tall above the surrounding plains, which might be a remnant of an ancient continent. All of these measurements will help connect Earth’s next door neighbor to similar planets orbiting other stars that may be observed with the James Webb Space Telescope.
The DAVINCI+ team spans NASA centers (Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Langley Research Center, Ames Research Center), aerospace partners (Lockheed Martin), and Universities (University of Michigan) to deliver ground-breaking science during the late 2020’s and early 2030’s with a launch in 2029, flybys of Venus in 2030, probe-based measurements in June 2031. The information sent back to Earth will rewrite the textbooks and inspire the next generation of planetary scientists. The NASA Goddard led team includes Principal Investigator Jim Garvin and Deputy Principal Investigators Stephanie Getty and Giada Arney, as well as Project Manager Ken Schwer, lead Systems Engineer Michael Sekerak, and many others at Goddard, Lockheed Martin, and at other institutions. The team is excited to return NASA to Venus to address our sister planet’s long-standing mysteries!
Music: “Haymaker” – Jordan Rudess & Joseph Stevenson, via Universal Production Music
Video credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Produced & Edited by: David Ladd (AIMM)
Narrated by: Jerome Hruska
Animations by: NASA’s Conceptual Image Lab
Walt Feimer (KBRwyle) – Animation Manager
Michael Lentz (KBRwyle) – Art Director/Animator
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#1
by
catdlr
on 02 Jun, 2021 23:32
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#2
by
Thunderscreech
on 09 Jun, 2021 17:33
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#3
by
Star One
on 09 Nov, 2021 16:48
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The DAVINCI Mission to Venus:
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#4
by
Star One
on 03 Jun, 2022 07:01
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New paper concerning the DAVINCI mission to Venus.
Revealing the Mysteries of Venus: The DAVINCI Mission
Abstract
The Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission described herein has been selected for flight to Venus as part of the NASA Discovery Program. DAVINCI will be the first mission to Venus to incorporate science-driven flybys and an instrumented descent sphere into a unified architecture. The anticipated scientific outcome will be a new understanding of the atmosphere, surface, and evolutionary path of Venus as a possibly once-habitable planet and analog to hot terrestrial exoplanets. The primary mission design for DAVINCI as selected features a preferred launch in summer/fall 2029, two flybys in 2030, and descent-sphere atmospheric entry by the end of 2031. The in situ atmospheric descent phase subsequently delivers definitive chemical and isotopic composition of the Venus atmosphere during an atmospheric transect above Alpha Regio. These in situ investigations of the atmosphere and near-infrared (NIR) descent imaging of the surface will complement remote flyby observations of the dynamic atmosphere, cloud deck, and surface NIR emissivity. The overall mission yield will be at least 60 Gbits (compressed) new data about the atmosphere and near surface, as well as the first unique characterization of the deep atmosphere environment and chemistry, including trace gases, key stable isotopes, oxygen fugacity, constraints on local rock compositions, and topography of a tessera.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac63c2
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#5
by
redliox
on 11 Nov, 2022 20:25
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#6
by
jbenton
on 12 Nov, 2022 04:13
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Thanks for the links.
Previous thread for DAVINCI+ is here:
NASA Goddard - DAVINCI+ Mission to VenusI'll be looking forward to this mission.
EDIT: I just found this brief video from NASA Goddard about the mission:
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#7
by
Skyrocket
on 12 Nov, 2022 20:43
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The mission had been renamed to simply "DAVINCI" dropping the "+" shortly after having been selected.
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#8
by
vjkane
on 12 Nov, 2022 23:27
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The mission had been renamed to simply "DAVINCI" dropping the "+" shortly after having been selected.
I believe that the + part was a plan to have the carrier spacecraft enter Venusian orbit after probe delivery to study Venus with one or two instruments. With VERITAS' selection, those measurements became redundant (and EnVision will also duplicate what DAVINCI+ would have done).
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#9
by
deadman1204
on 14 Nov, 2022 14:17
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The mission had been renamed to simply "DAVINCI" dropping the "+" shortly after having been selected.
I believe that the + part was a plan to have the carrier spacecraft enter Venusian orbit after probe delivery to study Venus with one or two instruments. With VERITAS' selection, those measurements became redundant (and EnVision will also duplicate what DAVINCI+ would have done).
Wasn't it plus because the proposal failed last time, so this was the "improved" proposal?
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#10
by
vjkane
on 14 Nov, 2022 21:53
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The mission had been renamed to simply "DAVINCI" dropping the "+" shortly after having been selected.
I believe that the + part was a plan to have the carrier spacecraft enter Venusian orbit after probe delivery to study Venus with one or two instruments. With VERITAS' selection, those measurements became redundant (and EnVision will also duplicate what DAVINCI+ would have done).
Wasn't it plus because the proposal failed last time, so this was the "improved" proposal?
The original DAVINCI proposal, along with VERITAS, Psyche, Lucy, and I believe Mantis were found to be fully selectable both scientifically, technically, and programmatically. The NASA associate administrator for science could only select 2.
I understand that similarly in the last competition, all four finalists were found to be fully selectable, but only two could be
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#11
by
catdlr
on 04 Mar, 2023 11:56
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NASA Prepares to Explore Venus with DAVINCIMar 1, 2023
Inspired by the Renaissance vision of Leonardo da Vinci, NASA is presently preparing its scientific return to Venus’ atmosphere and surface with a mission known as the “Deep Atmosphere of Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging” (DAVINCI).
The DAVINCI mission will “take the plunge” into Venus’ enigmatic history using an instrumented deep atmosphere probe spacecraft that will carry five instruments for measuring the chemistry and environments throughout the clouds and to the surface, while also conducting the first descent imaging of a mountain system on Venus known as Alpha Regio, which may represent an ancient continent. In addition, the DAVINCI mission includes two science flybys of Venus during which it will search for clues to mystery molecules in the upper cloud deck while also measuring the rock types in some of Venus highland regions.
All of these new and unique measurements will make the ‘exoplanet next door’ into a key place for understanding Earth and Venus sized exoplanets that may have similar histories to our sister planet. DAVINCI will pave the way for a series of missions by NASA and ESA in the 2030’s by opening the frontier as it searches for clues to whether Venus harbored oceans and how its atmosphere-climate system evolved over billions of years. DAVINCI’s science will address questions about habitability and how it could be “lost” as rocky planets evolve over time. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight center leads the DAVINCI Mission as the PI institution.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
James Tralie (ADNET):
Lead Producer
Lead Editor
Giada Arney (NASA):
Narrator
Walt Feimer (KBRwyle):
Animator
Jonathan North (KBRwyle):
Animator
Michael Lentz (KBRwyle):
Animator
Krystofer Kim (KBRwyle):
Animator
James Garvin (NASA, Chief Scientist Goddard):
Scientist
Music: "Blackened Skies" by Enrico Cacace and Lorenzo Castellarin of Universal Production Music
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#12
by
Star One
on 06 Jul, 2023 16:43
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Cross posting this as it’s relevant to this thread as well as you can see in the quotes below
New observations have again detected phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.
More traces of a gas thought to be a sign of life have been found in the clouds and haze layers of Venus.
They come primarily from the first 50 of 200 hours of observations using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii—far more than the eight hours used for the original detection—but also involve new data from NASA’s now defunct Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) airplane.
This is the key part.
JCMT’s latest detections of phosphine from February 2022 and May 2023 are significant because they hugely extend the scope of the initial study. They also suggest that there’s a steady source of phosphine either in or below the clouds of Venus.
“We now have five detections over the last few years, from three different sets of instruments, and from many methods of processing the data,” said Professor Jane Greaves, an astrobiologist at the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University whose team has been conducting tests as part of a 200-hour legacy survey using JCMT. “We’re getting a clue here that there is some steady source, which is the point of legacy surveys—to show whether that’s true or not,” said Greaves.
However, it’s DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) that could provide a phosphine detection in-situ. Scheduled to arrive in 2031, during a fatal 63-minute descent it will sample the Venusian atmosphere half a dozen times and fire lasers through it and measure the gases.
“They have four of these laser wavelengths to allocate and only three are decided,” said Greaves. “We made our case for phosphine and we’re just waiting for hear back.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/07/06/phosphine-confirmed-deep-within-venus-atmosphere-a-possible-sign-of-life/?sh=488e03531106
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#13
by
deadman1204
on 07 Jul, 2023 15:27
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we know next to nothing about the geology of venus. Not a fan of everytime there might be a wiff of a gas in the atmosphere, it means there is near impossible to exist life there. We don't even know how volcanically active the planet really is, much less what all the major geochemical processes that are occurring there.
Life really feels like the least likely scenario here - not just because of lack of knowledge. But because once you consider what is required for said life to exist for eons, magically staying afloat, getting the resources to reproduce fast enough, ect. It all feels incredibly contrived.
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#14
by
Star One
on 07 Jul, 2023 18:29
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we know next to nothing about the geology of venus. Not a fan of everytime there might be a wiff of a gas in the atmosphere, it means there is near impossible to exist life there. We don't even know how volcanically active the planet really is, much less what all the major geochemical processes that are occurring there.
Life really feels like the least likely scenario here - not just because of lack of knowledge. But because once you consider what is required for said life to exist for eons, magically staying afloat, getting the resources to reproduce fast enough, ect. It all feels incredibly contrived.
They were saying the same thing about certain extreme locations on Earth where we have actually ended up finding life. In fact the kind of argument you are putting forward at least as far as the Earth is concerned has consistently proved to be wrong.
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#15
by
deadman1204
on 08 Jul, 2023 02:38
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we know next to nothing about the geology of venus. Not a fan of everytime there might be a wiff of a gas in the atmosphere, it means there is near impossible to exist life there. We don't even know how volcanically active the planet really is, much less what all the major geochemical processes that are occurring there.
Life really feels like the least likely scenario here - not just because of lack of knowledge. But because once you consider what is required for said life to exist for eons, magically staying afloat, getting the resources to reproduce fast enough, ect. It all feels incredibly contrived.
They were saying the same thing about certain extreme locations on Earth where we have actually ended up finding life. In fact the kind of argument you are putting forward at least as far as the Earth is concerned has consistently proved to be wrong.
There is no where on earth as unlikely for life as staying afloat in the clouds of venus.
Earth is different because there is life everywhere. Life has time to try and move into a new nitch. There is no giant resevior of life on venus, its all magically staying afloat in the clouds, and reproducing at high speed cause it only gets slow long as it falls, always getting enough water and nutrients.
Once you learn about the requirements for that life to exist, it becomes pretty silly
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#16
by
DanClemmensen
on 08 Jul, 2023 04:22
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we know next to nothing about the geology of venus. Not a fan of everytime there might be a wiff of a gas in the atmosphere, it means there is near impossible to exist life there. We don't even know how volcanically active the planet really is, much less what all the major geochemical processes that are occurring there.
Life really feels like the least likely scenario here - not just because of lack of knowledge. But because once you consider what is required for said life to exist for eons, magically staying afloat, getting the resources to reproduce fast enough, ect. It all feels incredibly contrived.
They were saying the same thing about certain extreme locations on Earth where we have actually ended up finding life. In fact the kind of argument you are putting forward at least as far as the Earth is concerned has consistently proved to be wrong.
There is no where on earth as unlikely for life as staying afloat in the clouds of venus.
Earth is different because there is life everywhere. Life has time to try and move into a new nitch. There is no giant resevior of life on venus, its all magically staying afloat in the clouds, and reproducing at high speed cause it only gets slow long as it falls, always getting enough water and nutrients.
Once you learn about the requirements for that life to exist, it becomes pretty silly
life could not evolve on Venus today, but we do not know the history of the Venusian atmosphere. Life could have evolved on the surface in water before there was enough CO
2 to create a greenhouse effect, and that life could have evolved floating forms that survived as the planet heated up. I think this is highly unlikely, but not impossible. On Earth, the atmosphere changed profoundly as life evolved, life came into existence in an oxygen-poor atmosphere and could not come into existence in our current oxygen-rich atmosphere.
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#17
by
Star One
on 08 Jul, 2023 10:25
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we know next to nothing about the geology of venus. Not a fan of everytime there might be a wiff of a gas in the atmosphere, it means there is near impossible to exist life there. We don't even know how volcanically active the planet really is, much less what all the major geochemical processes that are occurring there.
Life really feels like the least likely scenario here - not just because of lack of knowledge. But because once you consider what is required for said life to exist for eons, magically staying afloat, getting the resources to reproduce fast enough, ect. It all feels incredibly contrived.
They were saying the same thing about certain extreme locations on Earth where we have actually ended up finding life. In fact the kind of argument you are putting forward at least as far as the Earth is concerned has consistently proved to be wrong.
There is no where on earth as unlikely for life as staying afloat in the clouds of venus.
Earth is different because there is life everywhere. Life has time to try and move into a new nitch. There is no giant resevior of life on venus, its all magically staying afloat in the clouds, and reproducing at high speed cause it only gets slow long as it falls, always getting enough water and nutrients.
Once you learn about the requirements for that life to exist, it becomes pretty silly
Yeah that’s Venus not as we know it now but as it was in the past. It’s believed that Venus stayed habitable both up to a more recent time than Mars and was more suitable for life when it was habitable. The runaway greenhouse of modern Venus seems to be a relatively recent thing in terms of the age of the Solar System.
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#18
by
VSECOTSPE
on 08 Jul, 2023 16:19
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6. Plausible Evolutionary Trajectories on Other Worlds
6.7. Life in a Planetary Atmosphere
Given that the biosphere on Earth is so centered on the surface and subsurface of our planet, it may seem strange to consider the planetary atmosphere as a habitat, given its low density, sparse amount of nutrients, and scarcity of liquids. However, even Earth’s atmosphere serves as a temporary habitat, mostly for long distance transportation of microbial life. It is now recognized that the transport of microbes from Earth’s surface to the clouds is a common phenomenon [150,151] and that clouds harbor a diverse range of microbial life, including archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, and viruses [152,153]. Viable microbes have even been found in the stratosphere, at an altitude of 38 km [151]. And microbes have been shown to be physiologically active and metabolizing in cloud droplets [153], but so far reproduction has not been demonstrated in the aerial habitat, so Earth’s atmosphere cannot yet be considered as a permanent habitat for life. However, if it is not, that should not be surprising, because natural selection has likely focused on temporary survival rather than adopting a life cycle permanently sustained in Earth’s clouds given that the environmental conditions on Earth’s surface are so well-suited for life [154]. Another challenge for clouds on Earth as a permanent habitat is that they are not continuous, so any microorganism will eventually be deposited back on the surface by precipitation within a few days or weeks at most [155].
However, many other planetary bodies do have permanent clouds such as Venus, Titan, and the gas giants of our Solar System. Venus is especially interesting in this respect because oceans may have existed on the Venusian surface until roughly 700 million years ago [156]. Even if habitable conditions on Venus existed for a much shorter time, life may have been transferred by asteroids from Earth or even Mars when Venus was still habitable; or it may have independently originated on the surface given environmental conditions likely resembling those of the early Earth [157]. At some point in history, the Venusian surface became uninhabitable with temperatures of about 737 K and 92 bar pressure; and life, if it survived, would only have had the atmosphere left as a last refuge. Schulze-Makuch and Irwin [7] summarized why the Venusian atmosphere, particularly the lower cloud layer at an altitude from 48 to 60 km, could be a habitat for life: (1) The lower atmosphere is thick, so microbial transport between the surface and the cloud layer would be easier than in Earth’s atmosphere. (2) The clouds of Venus are much larger, providing more continuous and stable environments than clouds on Earth. (3) Current conditions in the lower cloud layer of Venus are relatively benign at 300–350 K, 1 bar pressure, and a pH of 0—conditions of temperature, pressure, and pH under which thermoacidophilic microbes are known to thrive on Earth. (4) Cloud particles are projected to last for several months in the Venusian atmosphere compared to only days on Earth [158]. (5) The Venusian atmosphere is super-rotating, thus cutting the nighttime significantly and thereby allowing for more photosynthesis. (6) Water vapor is reasonably dense in the lower cloud layers of Venus. (7) Oxygenated species, such as SO2 and O2, coexist in thermodynamic disequilibrium with reducing species such as H2S and H2.
The Venusian atmosphere also harbors an unknown mechanism for absorbing more than half of all the UV irradiation the planet receives. Limaye et al. [159] suggested that this could be the result of an energy capture process by an aerial biosphere. Schulze-Makuch et al. [160] speculated that this UV absorber could be elemental sulfur, especially cycloocta sulfur (S8), which has the intriguing capacity to adsorb UV radiation and re-radiate it in the visible light spectrum. Thus, microbial life coated with S8 would be able to photosynthesize, in principle. This sulfur-based photosynthesis could produce an ecosystem in the Venusian cloud layer in which the sulfur that is oxidized during photosynthesis is later reduced by chemoautrophic microorganisms.
A related model was suggested by Seager et al. [154], who envisioned hydrophilic filaments in addition to the elemental sulfur that could accumulate the critical liquids the microbes would need. They suggested that the life cycle in the Venusian atmosphere would involve drying out of the microorganisms as liquid droplets containing them evaporated during settling. The smaller desiccated spores would fall into the lower haze layer at an altitude of 33–48 km, from which most of them would eventually return to the lower cloud layer by upward diffusion or convection, where they would be rehydrated by cloud condensation and complete their life cycle. In both hypotheses, some of the microorganism would fall to the Venusian surface and be lost, but microbial reproduction within the lower cloud layer would make up for the lost biomass.
https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1997/6/9/130
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#19
by
deadman1204
on 10 Jul, 2023 16:08
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we know next to nothing about the geology of venus. Not a fan of everytime there might be a wiff of a gas in the atmosphere, it means there is near impossible to exist life there. We don't even know how volcanically active the planet really is, much less what all the major geochemical processes that are occurring there.
Life really feels like the least likely scenario here - not just because of lack of knowledge. But because once you consider what is required for said life to exist for eons, magically staying afloat, getting the resources to reproduce fast enough, ect. It all feels incredibly contrived.
They were saying the same thing about certain extreme locations on Earth where we have actually ended up finding life. In fact the kind of argument you are putting forward at least as far as the Earth is concerned has consistently proved to be wrong.
There is no where on earth as unlikely for life as staying afloat in the clouds of venus.
Earth is different because there is life everywhere. Life has time to try and move into a new nitch. There is no giant resevior of life on venus, its all magically staying afloat in the clouds, and reproducing at high speed cause it only gets slow long as it falls, always getting enough water and nutrients.
Once you learn about the requirements for that life to exist, it becomes pretty silly
Yeah that’s Venus not as we know it now but as it was in the past. It’s believed that Venus stayed habitable both up to a more recent time than Mars and was more suitable for life when it was habitable. The runaway greenhouse of modern Venus seems to be a relatively recent thing in terms of the age of the Solar System.
No one is talking about venus of the past. I'm talking present. Go and learn about all the tricks and special situations needed for imagined life to exist on venus today. Its rather unlikely.
However lets put all this aside. The whole phosphine thing is no different than "i saw a strange light so it MUST be aliens". Someone is claiming that since we cannot rule out alien life, it MUST be alien life....
This whole life thing on venus is based a prospective detection of phosphine (lots of people argue its not even there, or if so at much lower levels). It's then said that if it exists and has the levels they think it has, it can't be geologic. However we don't even have a basic grasp of how many active volcanos venus has (just discoverd one recently). We know SOOO little about the geology (much less the geochemistry) of Venus, that its a little silly to claim it must be life.
Would it be super amazing and awesome of it was life? Of course! However were at the level of swamp gas and satellite reflections for proof of life on Venus.