The airplane-mounted SOFIA telescope didn't see signs of the possible biomarker.
"Phosphine is a relatively simple chemical compound — it's just a phosphorus atom with three hydrogens — so you would think that would be fairly easy to produce. But on Venus, it's not obvious how it could be made," said Martin Cordiner, a researcher in astrochemistry and planetary science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Bringing SOFIA to bear on Venus posed its own challenges, according to the USRA team. The planet was visible for only about half an hour after sunset, and the aircraft needed to be in the right place at the right time. Since Venus is inside the orbit of Earth, the planet has phases from our perspective, like the moon, and is close to the sun in the sky.
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