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The inside story of the new NASA missions to Venus

But by those same parameters, if we were observing our own solar system from afar, we might think Venus should be Earth-like too. “If you can’t understand Venus, which is our closest Earth-like neighbor, what chance do you have of believing anything some astrophysicist tells us about exoplanets?” says planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Limaye is part of a contingent of Venus researchers interested in finding out whether its cloud layer could still host microbial life. In 2020, investigators reported in the journal Nature Astronomy seeing signatures of phosphine—a chemical known thus far only to come from biological sources—in the atmosphere. Though claims about the possible discovery didn’t pan out, the news helped to spotlight the planet as an overlooked astrobiology target.