Russian scientist who was part of the Soviet-era team that sent the unmanned Venera 13 landing probe to Venus three decades ago now claims that photos taken on that mission show life exists on the steamy surface of Earth's neighbor. Skeptics say Leonid Ksanfomaliti's evidence is really just a lens cap from the probe itself that the scienctist has mistaken for a "crab-like" creature.
Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a respected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called for a new examination of photos taken during the 1982 Venera 13 mission in an article published in Solar System Research, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.
The 79-year-old scientist claims the photos show objects resembling "a disk," "a black flap," and "a scorpion" that "emerge, fluctuate, and disappear" in different photos—appearing to change location as if alive, according to the news agency.
"What if we forget about the current theories about the nonexistence of life on Venus, let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," RIA Novosti quotes Ksanfomaliti as saying in a translation of his Solar System Research article.
A slide show of the photos in question has been put together by Life's Little Mysteries. While some of Ksanfomaliti's claims of Venusian life revolve around difficult-to-discern blurs in the photographers, the most provocative images depict an object that does look a bit like a terrestrial crustacean of some sort.
But technicians and photography experts familiar with the unmanned Soviet missions to Venus in the 1970s and 1980s say all of the seeming anomalies in the photos can be explained.
Ted Stryck, a photo editor works with images generated by the Soviet space program, told Life's Little Mysteries that the blur identified by Ksanfomaliti as a scorpion-like organism is really just an artifact contained "in some particularly bad versions of the images" and is "not in the original data."
The "crab" that the scientist claims changed its location in different photos is really a pair of camera lens caps that were designed to break off the probe upon landing, according to Mars Space Flight Facility research technician Jonathon Hill, who also spoke with the site. Since Venera 13 possessed two cameras and two breakaway lens covers, they may appear to have moved location but are in fact two separate objects.
Those half-circle-shaped lens covers actually caused a pretty big problem on another Venus mission, Hill told Life's Little Mysteries. A lens cap belonging to a camera on the Venera 14 probe, which landed near to the Venera 13, popped off and landed in the precise spot where another spring-loaded device was supposed to touch the planet's surface to make measurements. Instead, the second probe wound up measuring properties of the lens cover to the consternation of Soviet scientists.
Meanwhile, photos from the Venera 14 probe show a lens cap in roughly the same position relative to the spacecraft as the object near Venera 13 that Ksanfomaliti claims is a living creature.
"If those objects were already on the surface of Venus, what are the chances that Venera 13 and 14, which landed nearly 1,000 kilometers apart, would both land inches away from the only ones in sight and they would be in the same positions relative to the spacecraft," Hill said. "It makes much more sense that it's a piece of the lander designed to break off during the deployment of one of the scientific instruments."
