A Russian scientist thinks that it may have found lifeforms outside Earth

Jan 24, 2012 07:38 GMT  ·  By

According to a paper published in a recent issue of the scientific journal Solar System Research, a Russian expert was recently able to discover what appears to be Venusian lifeforms, in old pictures.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union dispatched a series of space probes to our neighboring planet, including a number of landers and other robotic spacecraft. While revisiting the image sent back by one of these probes – the Venera-13 lander, scientist Leonid Ksanfomaliti made a discovery.

The respected expert, who is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was a part of the teams that handled the spacecraft when they were launched to Venus. He found what he believes are alien creatures in old images snapped by Venera-13.

In the journal paper, he explains that a crab-like creature and a disc-shaped object appear to change locations from one shot to the other. The expert wrote the new research in order to analyze the images in more detail, Space reports.

The Russian media agency Ria Novosti quotes the expert as saying that the spacecraft images reveal several such objects. “Let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living,” Ksanfomaliti writes in the paper.

But skeptics are not at all convinced that life can endure on Venus. They say that the Russian expert may simply be interpreting an interplay between image blurs and camera lens covers as meaning life.

In addition, an American scientist draws attention to the fact that one of the objects Ksanfomaliti classifies as living may in fact be a mechanical component. It is also visible in images taken by the Venera-14 probe, which set down close to Venera-13 landing site.

Arizona State University (ASU) Mars Space Flight Facility research technician and mission planner Jonathon Hill, the one who proposed this explanation, was involved with a series of missions NASA sent to Mars. He says that high-resolution versions of the Russian images show the mechanical nature of the objects.

“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 asks.

“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,” the investigator concludes, quoted by Space.