Things are finally looking up for NASA’s first missions to Venus in a generation - Ars Technica

Most planetary scientists will tell you the heyday of Venus exploration was more than a generation ago. That is about to change.

Two NASA missions are on track to launch to Venus in the early 2030s. The first, known as the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI), is now scheduled for launch in December 2030, a year earlier than previously planned. DAVINCI will send a parachute-assisted descent probe through the atmosphere of Venus, returning the first direct images of the planet’s surface since 1982. A second mission, Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy (VERITAS), will follow with a launch in November 2032 to map the Venusian surface by radar from orbit.

The European Space Agency is building another orbiter, Envision, for launch to Venus in 2032. The Venus armada might get started as soon as next year, when Rocket Lab aims to launch a privately funded probe to search for signs of organic material in the planet’s clouds.

That was the update last week at a meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG), a confab of scientists whose research interests focus on the scorching world just sunward from Earth. Europe’s Envision orbiter will also launch to Venus in 2032. The Venus armada might get started as soon as late 2027, when Rocket Lab aims to launch a privately funded probe to search for signs of organic material in the planet’s high-altitude clouds.

None of this was guaranteed. Budget cuts imperiled one US mission to Venus and delayed the other, then forced NASA to pull out of a partnership with Europe to supply a key part for Envision. But scientists at last week’s VEXAG meeting struck an optimistic tone.

“We have some good news for Venus,” said Jim Garvin, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and principal investigator for DAVINCI.

It wasn’t easy for Venus to find its moment. Mars has hogged the spotlight for decades and remains the long-term lodestar for human spaceflight. The enigma of comets and asteroids lured the world’s space agencies into funding a series of robotic probes to study them. The icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, some of which may hold the ingredients for life, are the latest hotspots for planetary exploration.

But Venus ventures closer to Earth than any other planet, making it the easiest world for a spacecraft to reach, if not land on. Venus is roughly the same size as Earth and may have once shared a similar climate, but something happened to turn it into an inhospitable world with an atmosphere made of nearly pure carbon dioxide, clouds of toxic sulfuric acid, and temperatures hot enough to melt lead, about 872° Fahrenheit (467° Celsius).

There’s still plenty to learn about Venus. The planet is less well mapped than Mars, and scientists aren’t exactly sure what triggered Venus’ runaway greenhouse effect. It is notoriously difficult to land on Venus, where the air pressure is 93 times that of sea level on Earth, equivalent to about 3,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface.

NASA’s last mission to Venus was Magellan, which mapped the planet’s tortured surface with a radar instrument capable of peering through the atmosphere’s opaque acid clouds. Magellan launched in 1989 and ended its mission in 1994, revealing the broad strokes of Venus’ landscape for the first time, but with only enough resolution to resolve features the size of a football field or larger.

That left a lot to be desired. Japan and Europe launched orbiters to Venus in 2005 and 2010 with instruments tuned to study the planet’s atmosphere. But it took 30 years for missions to improve on Magellan’s map to win support from decision-makers at NASA and the European Space Agency.

The fortunes of Venus scientists changed in a big way in June 2021, when NASA and ESA selected three Venus missions for development in a span of just eight days. “The Venus community is absolutely elated and excited and wants to just get to work and see this happen,” said Ellen Stofan, a Venus scientist and under secretary for Science and Research at the Smithsonian Institution, in an interview with Ars at the time.

It turned out the fight for Venus wasn’t over. Less than two years later, NASA officials considered canceling one of the two NASA-led missions, known as VERITAS, amid budget pressures in the agency’s planetary science division. The money problems largely stemmed from delays and cost overruns with the Psyche mission, NASA’s first spacecraft to explore the metal asteroid.