• The general manager of the Russian space company Roscosmos claimed this week that Venus is a “Russian planet”.
• “Resumption of the exploration of Venus is on our agenda. We believe that Venus is a Russian planet, so we should not be left behind,” Dmitry Rogozin told reporters on Tuesday.
• Rogozin also revealed the country’s plans to send its special mission to Venus, as well as a joint venture already proposed with the United States called “Venera-D”.
• The comments by top space officials come against the backdrop of new research published this week that found just that Clouds of Venus may be home to microbial life.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

The head of the Russian Space Agency has gambled on the country’s claim on Venus, saying this week it is “a Russian planet”.

Dmitry Rogozin, general manager of the Russian space company Roscosmos, revealed that the country plans to send its own mission to Venus.

This will be on top of a joint project already proposed with the United States called “Venera-D” which will include sending an unmanned space mission to the planet in 2026 or 2031.

“Our country was the first and only one to successfully land on Venus,” Rogozin told reporters at an international exhibition of helicopters in Moscow on Tuesday. “The spacecraft has collected information about the planet – it’s like hell there,” According to the Times.

“Resumption of the exploration of Venus is on our agenda. We believe that Venus is a Russian planet, so we should not be left behind,” he added. CNN reported.

Rogozin’s comments come days after new research sIt is suggested that a gas on Earth called phosphine has also been discovered in Venus’ atmosphere, Which means that planet clouds could harbor microbial life.

In the study, published in Nature Astronomy on MondayCardiff University professor Jane Graves and her team said their discovery makes Venus a new field of interest.

“Our hoped-for impact in the planetary science community is to stimulate more research on Venus itself, to search for the possibilities of life in the atmosphere of Venus, and even to space missions that focus on finding signs of life or even life itself in the atmosphere of Venus,” Seiger said, According to CNN.

Venus is the second farthest planet from the sun and is considered one of the hottest planets in our solar system.

The planet’s atmosphere is made almost entirely of carbon dioxide and is the second brightest object in the night sky after the moon.

The Soviet Union became the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on Venus in 1970. The Venera 7 probe was one of many sensors sent to the planet and became the first to transmit data from there to Earth.

Although it made a soft landing, it melted within seconds.

Its successor Venera 9 – also launched by the Russians – took the first and only image of the surface of Venus from a ground-level perspective in 1975.

Rogozin said the country plans to send its special mission to Venus between 2021 and 2030.