India and France to launch Venus Mission – Burning Issues

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FRANCE–INDIA

ISRO and CNES (French National Space Agency) have an umbrella agreement, operating successfully since 1993, under which joint missions like Megha-Tropiquesand SARALhave been successfully developed.

France is one of the few countries which have a space counsellor stationed in ISRO’s headquarters Bengaluru.

In the domain of space exploration, France will be taking part in ISRO’s mission to Venus, scheduled to launch in 2025. The VIRAL instrument (Venus Infrared Atmospheric Gases Linker) co-developed with the Russian federal space agency Roscosmosand the LATMOS atmospheres, environments and space observations laboratory attached to the French national scientific research centre CNRS has been selected by ISRO after a request for proposals.
CNES will coordinate and prepare the French contribution, the first time a French payload will be flown on an Indian exploration mission.

Venus has been in the news a lot recently because of the potential of life in its atmosphere
An international team of astronomers about the discovery of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus

Apart from being produced in industrial processes, phosphine, a colourless but smelly gas, is known to be made only by some species of bacteria that survive in the absence of oxygen.
In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, a team of scientists have reported traces of phosphine in a concentration of approximately 20 parts per billion, thousands to millions of times more than what could otherwise be expected.