Did NASA detect a hint of life on Venus in 1978 and not realize it?
If life does exist on Venus, NASA may have first detected it back in 1978. But the finding went unnoticed for 42 years.
... But now, digging through archival NASA data, Rakesh Mogul, a biochemist at Cal Poly Pomona in California, and colleagues have found a hint of phosphine picked up by Pioneer 13 — a probe that reached Venus in December 1978.
"When the [Nature Astronomy paper] came out, I immediately thought of the legacy mass spectra," Mogul told Live Science. ...
Mogul and his coauthors were broadly familiar with the data from the missions, he said. "So, for us, it was a natural next step to give the data another look. As such, after consulting with my co-authors, we identified the original scientific articles, and promptly started looking for phosphorous compounds."
The discovery, published to the arXiv database Sept. 22 and not yet peer reviewed, doesn't tell researchers much beyond what was reported in Nature Astronomy — though it does make the presence of phosphine (made up of a phosphorus atom and three hydrogens) even more certain, they said. The 1978 data comes from the Large Probe Neutral Mass Spectrometer (LNMS), one of several instruments that descended into Venus' atmosphere as part of the Pioneer 13 mission. ...