“Davinci and Veritas” are the names of the two new space missions announced by NASA that will go to Venus by 2026.
The US space agency has not returned to the planet for 30 years “These two twin missions aim to find out why Venus has become a” hellish “planet and they intend to offer the scientific community to investigate a planet that “we have long lost sight of,” said Bill Nelson, number one at NASA.
The Davinci mission will investigate the planet’s atmosphere in depth, while Veritas will focus on its topography. What they discover could help resolve the debate over the possibility of life on the planet despite the presence of microbes in the planet’s clouds.
One of Davinci’s scientific goals will be, according to NASA, to understand the origin of Venus’s atmosphere, how it evolved and how and why it is so different from the atmospheres of Earth and Mars.
In addition, we will try to discover the volcanic history of the planet and that of the water of Venus.
The Veritas mission, on the other hand, will orbit the planet, exploring its surface through its dark clouds. This is thanks to an innovative radar system capable of creating 3D global maps and an infrared spectrometer.
The gravitational field of the planet will also be measured to determine the structure of the interior of Venus in order to offer a more complete idea of past and present geological processes, from the core to the surface.
Davinci and Veritas are part of NASA’s Discovery program. The program aims to give scientists the opportunity to develop planetary missions that delve into the mysteries of the solar system.
The last mission to study the surface of Venus dates back to 1989, when NASA sent the Magellan spacecraft to study the planet’s geology.
Venus is the infernal twin of the Earth. If a human stepped on its surface, he would see everything orange, the sky very low and foggy and he would die instantly, as the pressure there is equivalent to what is 1,000 meters under the sea. Its composition is rocky and its dimensions are almost identical to those of the Earth. But its atmosphere is made up of toxic gases that generate uncontrolled global warming that heats its surface to more than 400 degrees, capable of melting lead.
Unlike the truly “infernal” lower part, the high clouds of Venus look like heaven.
At about 50 kilometers above the surface the temperature is above 20 degrees and the pressure is almost terrestrial.
One of the first to propose that there could be life in the clouds of this planet was the scientist and popularizer Carl Sagan, who in 1967 published a study in Nature hypothesizing the life of macroscopic beings.
For two decades, the country that did the most for the exploration of Venus was the Soviet Union, which is responsible for much of the initial knowledge of this planet. Exploring Venus, the USSR was the first country to enter an extraterrestrial atmosphere, in 1967 with Venera 4, in 1970 with Venera 7 and in 1975 with Venera 9. Russia has closed the program but America wants to know. More.