Life on Venus?

[kerbiloid]

The Venusian lobby against the Martian one.

Also a fraction of the European lobbists. Not from Europe, but for Europa.

Edited September 19, 2020 by kerbiloid

[munlander1]

So is the next update going to be from the ESA/JAXA mission?

 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, korwynkim said:

This precludes any life similar to what we know about. This means if there is life, it would have to be completely different, having arisen through independent abiogenesis. But presents a bit of a dilemma since we can't use phosphine as a biosignature for any unknown life. It's suitability as a biomarker is based only on known anaerobic life.

Wrong. First of all, phosphine is a biomarker not based just on empirical evidence, but also thermodynamics. We can use phosphine as biosignature, because all known abiotic routes require greater temperatures than found on Venus. Outside gas giants, it is not something that can easily arise on its own, and besides life, we don't really know of any ways to drop energetic requirements for forming such molecules by that much.

Second of all, it's not even based on known anaerobic life, just suspected. Basically, they noticed it's produced by sludge, and that sterilizing the sludge removed this production, while adding glucose increased it. The exact organism had not been identified, and it would itself be a highly unusual one, due to aforementioned thermodynamics. I suppose they'll get back to looking to it now (read: some hapless grad student will have to sift through jars of sludge and culture the critters found in it  ).

Also, I've already mentioned the possibility of our models being wrong, particularly with regards to water content. The best data (the one used in the paper you cited) we have on this is from Venus Express, an orbiter. It indeed saw clouds that were mostly acid, but we don't really know whether these conditions are all that that exists on Venus, or if there are times or places when much higher water availability can be found. 

3 hours ago, korwynkim said:

This precludes any life similar to what we know about. This means if there is life, it would have to be completely different, having arisen through independent abiogenesis. But presents a bit of a dilemma since we can't use phosphine as a biosignature for any unknown life. It's suitability as a biomarker is based only on known anaerobic life.

Wrong. First of all, phosphine is a biomarker not based just on empirical evidence, but also thermodynamics. We can use phosphine as biosignature, because all known abiotic routes require greater temperatures than found on Venus. Outside gas giants, it is not something that can easily arise on its own, and besides life, we don't really know of any ways to drop energetic requirements for forming such molecules by that much.

Second of all, it's not even based on known anaerobic life, just suspected. Basically, they noticed it's produced by sludge, and that sterilizing the sludge removed this production, while adding glucose increased it. The exact organism had not been identified, and it would itself be a highly unusual one, due to aforementioned thermodynamics. I suppose they'll get back to looking to it now (read: some hapless grad student will have to sift through jars of sludge and culture the critters found in it  ).

Also, I've already mentioned the possibility of our models being wrong, particularly with regards to water content. The best data (the one used in the paper you cited) we have on this is from Venus Express, an orbiter. It indeed saw clouds that were mostly acid, but we don't really know whether these conditions are all that that exists on Venus, or if there are times or places when much higher water availability can be found. 

[korwynkim]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Wrong. First of all, phosphine is a biomarker not based just on empirical evidence, but also thermodynamics. We can use phosphine as biosignature, because all known abiotic routes require greater temperatures than found on Venus. Outside gas giants, it is not something that can easily arise on its own, and besides life, we don't really know of any ways to drop energetic requirements for forming such molecules by that much.

Wrong. High temperature and pressure as found in gas giants is only one way to make phosphine. In the second paper from my last post, the authors exhaustively list out all the relevant abiotic pathways they can think of. They calculate how much each of these processes might be producing based on our models (some don't produce any). The issue is that the estimated amount produced would be orders of magnitude lower than what we detected.

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Second of all, it's not even based on known anaerobic life, just suspected. Basically, they noticed it's produced by sludge, and that sterilizing the sludge removed this production, while adding glucose increased it. The exact organism had not been identified, and it would itself be a highly unusual one, due to aforementioned thermodynamics. I suppose they'll get back to looking to it now (read: some hapless grad student will have to sift through jars of sludge and culture the critters found in it  ).

This is very true but besides the point. We don't exactly know what organisms are producing it or how, but we can be pretty sure that they are. However, this tells us nothing about what unknown life might or might not produce.

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Also, I've already mentioned the possibility of our models being wrong, particularly with regards to water content. The best data (the one used in the paper you cited) we have on this is from Venus Express, an orbiter. It indeed saw clouds that were mostly acid, but we don't really know whether these conditions are all that that exists on Venus, or if there are times or places when much higher water availability can be found. 

On top of Venus Express, we also have data from Pioneer, the Venera landers, and many ground based observations on atmospheric composition. So we have a pretty good idea about the acidic content of the clouds and the average humidity level at various altitudes.

Sure, it's possible there are areas of higher humidity. Images from the currently orbiting Akatsuki showed what looks like a boundary between two air masses, similar to what we find on Earth between drier and more humid air. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6954018/

But the boundary dissipates within 2-10 days so it's not really stable.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, korwynkim said:

Wrong. High temperature and pressure as found in gas giants is only one way to make phosphine. In the second paper from my last post, the authors exhaustively list out all the relevant abiotic pathways they can think of. They calculate how much each of these processes might be producing based on our models (some don't produce any). The issue is that the estimated amount produced would be orders of magnitude lower than what we detected.

All right, there are some abiotic processes that could make it, but this is besides the underlying point. Phosphorus in phosphine is very reduced, and this is not a chemically optimal state for it to be in, in conditions similar to those on Venus. 

It is possible we are misestimating one of the abiotic processes, but highly unlikely. Discovery of either life or a previously unknown abiotic route are more likely than either of known ones doing a whole lot here.

5 hours ago, korwynkim said:

On top of Venus Express, we also have data from Pioneer, the Venera landers, and many ground based observations on atmospheric composition. So we have a pretty good idea about the acidic content of the clouds and the average humidity level at various altitudes.

Besides Venus Express, how many of them actually measured the water content in the clouds? Venera probes had pretty basic equipment, and most of them were landers, anyway, with instrumentation mostly focused on studying the surface and the lower atmosphere. Venus Express, at least, was specifically designed to study atmosphere. At any rate, the papers I've seen primarily cite Venus Express data.

Stability is not really a requirement. Some Earth plants (not even microbes, plants!) live for a few days of rain per year, or even several years, and spend most of their lifetime almost completely dried out. Life only has trouble in places where there's never any water, period. 

[korwynkim]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

It is possible we are misestimating one of the abiotic processes, but highly unlikely. Discovery of either life or a previously unknown abiotic route are more likely than either of known ones doing a whole lot here.

What I meant by our models being wrong was more about our assumptions about the conditions on Venus than our estimations given those assumptions. I find this more likely than finding an unknown process or life, though I haven't tried to estimate the probabilities. A good place to start would be to examine all the times where we found a phenomenon that we couldn't explain at first, then figure out how many of those were because our models weren't good enough vs how many were due to discovering an unknown process. We obviously haven't found life yet and that would be the least likely by far.

(does anyone know of such a list?)

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Besides Venus Express, how many of them actually measured the water content in the clouds? Venera probes had pretty basic equipment, and most of them were landers, anyway, with instrumentation mostly focused on studying the surface and the lower atmosphere. Venus Express, at least, was specifically designed to study atmosphere. At any rate, the papers I've seen primarily cite Venus Express data.

The Pioneer multiprobe made several direct measurements of the atmosphere. Venera 15 measurements line up with ground based measurements (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0273-1177(99)00170-2) and the earlier Venera data was reanalyzed and agree as well (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0032-0633(96)00143-2). Galileo also made remote measurements during its flyby. I'm sure other probes collected whatever data they could as well.

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Stability is not really a requirement. Some Earth plants (not even microbes, plants!) live for a few days of rain per year, or even several years, and spend most of their lifetime almost completely dried out. Life only has trouble in places where there's never any water, period. 

It's not a requirement but it does make it harder. The high winds would eventually spread any dried out microbes around, exposing them to acid. They also wouldn't produce phosphine when dried out which means there would need to be a higher biomass to make the same amount. We don't know how often these separate air masses form, whether it really is due to water or CO or COS or something else, and how much of a difference there is in humidity. But if areas of high enough humidity do occur regularly, it would certainly be a good place to look for life.

[Guest]

53 minutes ago, korwynkim said:

It's not a requirement but it does make it harder. The high winds would eventually spread any dried out microbes around, exposing them to acid. They also wouldn't produce phosphine when dried out which means there would need to be a higher biomass to make the same amount. We don't know how often these separate air masses form, whether it really is due to water or CO or COS or something else, and how much of a difference there is in humidity. But if areas of high enough humidity do occur regularly, it would certainly be a good place to look for life.

That's why we need to send a probe, and watch the atmosphere for a long time from up close, not intermittently and/or from orbit. We have a good picture of how it looks like from orbit, but remember that there are three tiers of clouds on Venus, of which only the topmost one is really visible from orbit (some instruments can penetrate it to a degree, but this has limits). Venusian atmosphere, like Earth's, is a very dynamic system, and Pioneer multiprobe, while a very useful mission, wasn't really geared for looking for water, not to mention the observation time was very short. Only the two Vega missions carried balloon probes that got a good look at the middle layer, and those were quite small, uncontrolled and had few instruments. 

Quite frankly, anything living there would likely have to be immune to the acid either way (in fact, it's easier to be acid-immune when dried out), so spreading might actually be a good thing for them. It would be hard to live in those conditions, but as long as water is there, it would be possible. Pulling it out of sulfuric acid is a tall order, but it's not necessarily all bound up like this.

[korwynkim]

32 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

That's why we need to send a probe, and watch the atmosphere for a long time from up close, not intermittently and/or from orbit.

Absolutely. More data is always better.

49 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

We have a good picture of how it looks like from orbit, but remember that there are three tiers of clouds on Venus, of which only the topmost one is really visible from orbit (some instruments can penetrate it to a degree, but this has limits). Venusian atmosphere, like Earth's, is a very dynamic system, and Pioneer multiprobe, while a very useful mission, wasn't really geared for looking for water, not to mention the observation time was very short. Only the two Vega missions carried balloon probes that got a good look at the middle layer, and those were quite small, uncontrolled and had few instruments. 

We are able to do look at spectral lines for water all the way down to the surface using ground based telescopes, let alone from orbit (https://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3869). The humidity level does seem to vary leading to some different measurements, but it's all within a small range.

You generally don't equip a probe with an instrument specifically designed to  find water. Just one of the spectrometers on the Pioneer had the capability to measure the level of a wide range of components with better than 1 ppm precision (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224457637_Pioneer_Venus_large_probe_neutral_mass_spectrometer)

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Quite frankly, anything living there would likely have to be immune to the acid either way (in fact, it's easier to be acid-immune when dried out), so spreading might actually be a good thing for them. It would be hard to live in those conditions, but as long as water is there, it would be possible. Pulling it out of sulfuric acid is a tall order, but it's not necessarily all bound up like this.

I believe we were discussing water within the context of Earth-like microbes? If we're considering unknown life, then yeah water is not a factor. It would be adapted to the conditions. The only example of life we have requires water, but that's only one sample. How important you consider water is on Venus depends on how strongly you weigh this evidence.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, korwynkim said:

We are able to do look at spectral lines for water all the way down to the surface using ground based telescopes, let alone from orbit (https://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3869). The humidity level does seem to vary leading to some different measurements, but it's all within a small range.

IIRC, this method has a poor spatial resolution, even from orbit. In fact, this is similar to a way we found phosphine. We can analyze the whole planet or large areas of it, but what I've seen of it can only tells us about climate and not the weather. We already know there's water vapor in Venusian atmosphere, and enough of it to make clouds that consist of sulfuric acid (which requires some water to even exist). Finding out how exactly it's distributed is harder.

And yes, it might require a dedicated instrument designed specifically to detect water. Such devices have been sent to Mars, for example MARSIS on Mars Express. 

56 minutes ago, korwynkim said:

I believe we were discussing water within the context of Earth-like microbes? If we're considering unknown life, then yeah water is not a factor. It would be adapted to the conditions. The only example of life we have requires water, but that's only one sample. How important you consider water is on Venus depends on how strongly you weigh this evidence.

Water is a factor, as I explained in a lengthy post earlier in the thread. There are very good physical reasons for it being important in anything resembling life, most notably everything about hydrogen bonds. Not only that, it has to be present in liquid phase, though that's not all that hard, because its liquid phase exists over a huge (relative to other materials) pressure and temperature range. The only thing that comes close would be ammonia, but that would require very low temperatures. 

[korwynkim]

19 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

And yes, it might require a dedicated instrument designed specifically to detect water. Such devices have been sent to Mars, for example MARSIS on Mars Express. 

Point taken. Either way, Pioneer could detect water very accurately.

21 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

IIRC, this method has a poor spatial resolution, even from orbit. In fact, this is similar to a way we found phosphine. We can analyze the whole planet or large areas of it, but what I've seen of it can only tells us about climate and not the weather. We already know there's water vapor in Venusian atmosphere, and enough of it to make clouds that consist of sulfuric acid (which requires some water to even exist). Finding out how exactly it's distributed is harder.

I wasn't disagreeing with you that we don't know in detail how water is distributed on Venus. I got the impression that you thought our level of confidence in the general water level at every altitude was less than was merited by the evidence, and was trying to clear that up. The Akatsuki observation only shifts my prior slightly toward there being times of high enough humidity in some areas.

I suppose we could continuously observe Venus from the ground to try to detect fluctuations, then corroborate with Akatsuki?

24 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Water is a factor, as I explained in a lengthy post earlier in the thread. There are very good physical reasons for it being important in anything resembling life, most notably everything about hydrogen bonds. Not only that, it has to be present in liquid phase, though that's not all that hard, because its liquid phase exists over a huge (relative to other materials) pressure and temperature range. The only thing that comes close would be ammonia, but that would require very low temperatures. 

Important for anything resembling known life. If we're considering unknown processes, then perhaps those can be used to form chemical bonds. Maybe unknown life would only need the amount of water we observe. Maybe they wouldn't need it at all. I admit I don't really know enough to say, and it's hard to evaluate the probability given one example. Maybe there are aliens somewhere, looking for planets with sulfuric acid because that's the only way they know of forming life.

[KerikBalm]

14 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Stability is not really a requirement. Some Earth plants (not even microbes, plants!) live for a few days of rain per year, or even several years, and spend most of their lifetime almost completely dried out. 

Not at all the same. Life on Earth can go dormant, and emerge just fine.

Cloud life needs to reproduce fast to compensate for the mixing with the lower atmosphere/falling out of suspension.

Dormancy for 10 years isn't an option if that means descending deep into the atmosphere where ver bad things happen due to the heat and pressure.

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Not at all the same. Life on Earth can go dormant, and emerge just fine.

Cloud life needs to reproduce fast to compensate for the mixing with the lower atmosphere/falling out of suspension.

Dormancy for 10 years isn't an option if that means descending deep into the atmosphere where ver bad things happen due to the heat and pressure.

It very much is an option, it just has to reproduce, during the activity period, at sufficient rate to exceed the number that fell down since the last event. Microbes can float with the wind for a long time (and the winds on Venus are very strong), and they very much do go on a reproduction frenzy if they encounter the right conditions. Also, remember that Earth life of this kind is mostly confined to one spot, while on Venus, it would have the whole planet to work with. This requires more research, but I don't think we're talking an event that's ultra-rare on a planetary scale.

7 hours ago, korwynkim said:

Important for anything resembling known life. If we're considering unknown processes, then perhaps those can be used to form chemical bonds. Maybe unknown life would only need the amount of water we observe. Maybe they wouldn't need it at all. I admit I don't really know enough to say, and it's hard to evaluate the probability given one example. Maybe there are aliens somewhere, looking for planets with sulfuric acid because that's the only way they know of forming life.

At most, you can invert the usual arrangement, with most of the organism nonpolar, and water inside the membranes and micelles. Besides, the amount of observable water is not the problem, it's more than enough. The problem is in its availability, H2SO4 is incredibly higroscopic, and presently, it seems to be hogging all of it. So, anything living out there would have to either find higher local concentrations of water, or find a way to wrestle it from the sulfuric acid, which would be quite an achievement.

It's just like the thing with carbon, water is pretty much unique, with only one, somewhat poor analogue. These properties both contribute to allowing both of them to create structures several orders of magnitude more complex than any others. 

7 hours ago, korwynkim said:

 

I suppose we could continuously observe Venus from the ground to try to detect fluctuations, then corroborate with Akatsuki?

That is hopefully something we're going to do. In absence of an in-situ probe, we'll have to make best of the measurements we can run with the existing equipment. I imagine Akatsuki will be getting a lot of attention in the coming days.

[Mitchz95]

On 9/18/2020 at 11:29 AM, sevenperforce said:

I wonder if theoretically it would make sense to do a potentially biohazardous sample return to the ISS.

On the one hand they have fewer containment measures. On the other hand they are one gigantic containment measure.

I saw that movie. It didn't end well.

[R-T-B]

1 hour ago, Mitchz95 said:

I saw that movie. It didn't end well.

Ah hollywood.  Stoking our inner fears we didn't even know we had since film was invented.

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Mitchz95 said:

I saw that movie. It didn't end well.

Just for the crew.

But finally it had a happy end.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

[KerikBalm]

12 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

It very much is an option, it just has to reproduce, during the activity period, at sufficient rate to exceed the number that fell down since the last event. Microbes can float with the wind for a long time (and the winds on Venus are very strong),

Yes, they need to reproduce at a rate that is faster than the number falling down.

They can float for a long time, but they are equally likely to float up as to float down. Strong winds can just mean better mixing. Some circulation cells can reduce the loss, but the loss rate would still be very high.

12 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

and they very much do go on a reproduction frenzy if they encounter the right conditions. 

But they won't... and keep in mind that xerophiles on Earth reproduce very slowly, orders of magnitude slower than non xerophiles.

Some specialist archea/bacteria are thought to take decades or even centuries to reproduce.

Reproducing like crazy in an a_w of about 0.15 is far from something that can be easily granted for the sake of argument... And they would need to

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Reproducing like crazy in an a_w of about 0.15 is far from something that can be easily granted for the sake of argument... And they would need to

If they live in a_w of 0.15, then they would likely reproduce slowly, but seeing as this are "normal" conditions on Venus, they could then do so continuously. If they just have to survive those conditions and only reproduce when they run into an area where it's locally higher, they could do it more quickly. Both are potentially viable approaches to the problem. In fact, organisms using both of those strategies could very well coexist. It's extremely unlikely that if we find extraterrestrial life, it'll be just one species, reliant on one strategy. 

Yes, specialized organisms can reproduce relatively slowly, but most of them still do this reasonably fast. "Much slower-breeding than bacteria" isn't saying much, seeing as bacteria reproduce ridiculously quickly if they have everything they need. Also, atmospheric circulation is complex, but not random, and there could be areas where air masses circulate at a narrow range of altitudes, much like jetstreams on Earth. Something carried by the wind in such areas would stay aloft for a really long time. Again, we need to know more about weather on Venus, not just its climate, to estimate such things accurately. Life on Earth, up to and including humans, greatly alters its behavior to account for the weather, and life cycles of many species are dependent on its peculiarities. There's no reason for life anywhere else to be any different in that regard.

Edited September 20, 2020 by Guest

[KerikBalm]

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10905

Stable but extreme environment, biomass turnover on the order of hundreds or thousands of years.

You can't assume that conditions that allow life automatically mean high reproduction rates.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

You can't assume that conditions that allow life automatically mean high reproduction rates.

I'm not, but having life in Venusian atmosphere does seem to require the microbes to reproduce rather briskly. I'm assuming that the conditions there allow them, which is a weaker assumption. In particular, the environment this paper deals with is extremely static, and also very low in energy. Atmosphere of Venus is completely different, so your example is not relevant. Energy (from either light or chemical reactions) is available on Venus, and so is carbon. These typically have a greater influence on reproduction rate than other environmental conditions. On top of that, the nature of the environment favors r-selected organisms. 

Organisms living on Venus would likely be significantly slower to reproduce than Earth ones, but they couldn't be slow in absolute sense, because such a species would be too vulnerable to being wiped out by capricious atmospheric currents.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Guest

[KerikBalm]

4 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

I'm not, but having life in Venusian atmosphere does seem to require the microbes to reproduce rather briskly. I'm assuming that the conditions there allow them, which is a weaker assumption. 

Yes, if there is life, it must reproduce relatively fast, which is one reason why I really doubt anything is there.

To your other point, yes it was an energy starved environment, but it was to generally express the point that conditions in which life can live don't necessarily mean conditions where lufe can live fast.

I mentioned xerophiles growing orders of magnitude slower. That could still be fast- but generally speaking, there is an a_w where they stop growing at all. As one gets arbitrarily close to this, the doubling time gets arbitrarily large.

The clouds of venus would be very nutrient limited in some aspects... Nitrogen, water, (phophorus?), trace minerals, sodium, potassium, etc. Maybe they can pull water from the atmosphere in an energy intensive process to hydrate the cell... pulling scarce resources from the environment slows growth related to how fast the resources can be pulled, and may be energy limited.

Bottom line, they compare specific and well defined abiotic processes to vague and undefined biological ones.

The only conclusion is that we don't know how it is being produced.

Lets not assume life. There is no positive evidence for that yet.

[kerbiloid]

Until the life has legally proven it's a life, it should be juridically treated as speaking minerals.

[korwynkim]

On 9/20/2020 at 12:59 AM, Dragon01 said:

That is hopefully something we're going to do. In absence of an in-situ probe, we'll have to make best of the measurements we can run with the existing equipment. I imagine Akatsuki will be getting a lot of attention in the coming days.

I doubt Akatsuki will be getting that much more attention. I don't think too many people really suspect anything about how the weather and climate might help sustain microbial life in the clouds. If anything, old data might get reanalyzed within that context.

Much more attention will be focused on the BepiColombo flybys.

54 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Lets not assume life. There is no positive evidence for that yet.

I don't think Dragon01 - or anyone for that matter - was ever assuming there was life, just arguing how it might not be outright impossible. Of course, this is built upon a tower of assumptions stacked on top of assumptions, but most things we can infer about Venus are.

[kerbiloid]

In the dark old times only illiterate and suspicious people treated the phosphine as something living...

Spoiler

But now the educated ones joined.

 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

The clouds of venus would be very nutrient limited in some aspects... Nitrogen, water, (phophorus?), trace minerals, sodium, potassium, etc. Maybe they can pull water from the atmosphere in an energy intensive process to hydrate the cell... pulling scarce resources from the environment slows growth related to how fast the resources can be pulled, and may be energy limited.

Venus has 3.5% of nitrogen in the atmosphere, so that wouldn't be a problem (aside from the fact nitrogen fixation is an energy hog). Sulfur, obviously, is available in great quantities.  So is chlorine, there's a fair bit of HCl. For others, we don't really know, particularly with regards to other phosphorus-containing species. Indeed, this question is paramount: where does the phosphorus come from? If it's floating around in atmosphere in a more oxidized form, then no problem. If it's not, then phosphine has to be coming up from the surface. The problem is, Venusian atmosphere had not been characterized well enough to say for sure. One of the papers cited even mentioned being the first time anyone took an interest in Venusian phosphorus in particular. I don't think anyone tried looking for most other elements. 

26 minutes ago, korwynkim said:

I doubt Akatsuki will be getting that much more attention. I don't think too many people really suspect anything about how the weather and climate might help sustain microbial life in the clouds. If anything, old data might get reanalyzed within that context.

Much more attention will be focused on the BepiColombo flybys.

Well, we're going to need all data we can get, and that'll mean looking at everything we have or had out there. Which, incidentally, isn't a whole lot, compared to Mars. Yeah, BepiColombo is gonna get put to work, as well, though besides a really neat array of spectrometers, it unfortunately doesn't have that many relevant instruments onboard. I guess it might bring us closer to answering the question from the first paragraph, by getting high resolution data on atmospheric composition, including detecting trace constituents that eluded us so far. 

[korwynkim]

We do need all the data we can get. This is true in general.

If you know anyone with a decent telescope and imaging setup, let them know that scientists are looking for help from amateur astronomers to gather data on Venus: http://pvol2.ehu.eus/bc/Venus/