Return to Venus: what is Nasa hoping to discover?

Nasa is hoping to return to Venus as early as 2028 with two missions to understand more about what may have been the first habitable planet in the solar system.

The ambitious deep space projects aim to find out how Venus “became an inferno-like world when it has so many other characteristics similar to ours”, says Nasa.

The US space agency has set aside $1bn (£700m) in developmental funding for the two missions, which will be America’s first exploration of the Earth’s closest planetary neighbour since 1989, when the Magellan spacecraft was launched on a five-year trip to map Venus’s volcanic surface.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Nasa, which launched the Perseverance mission to Mars last year, hopes to build on the data it uncovered in 1980s with these two new missions.

• The first mission, called Davinci+ (which stands for deep atmosphere Venus investigation of noble gases, chemistry and imaging), will measure the composition of the planet’s atmosphere to understand how it formed and evolved, as well as determine whether the planet ever had an ocean, says Nasa. It will also take high-resolution pictures of unique geological features on Venus called “tesserae”, which the space agency says could be comparable to Earth’s continents, suggesting that Venus has plate tectonics.
  
• The second mission the agency will launch is Veritas (Venus emissivity, radio science, InSAR, topography and spectroscopy). It will map Venus’s surface to “determine the planet’s geologic history and understand why it developed so differently than Earth”, says Nasa. It hopes that images of elevations on the surface of the planet will allow the creation of 3D reconstructions of topography and provide clues as to whether any volcanic activity is still taking place.

Venus is the second planet from the Sun, after Mercury, and is the hottest, says BBC Newsround, “with a surface temperature of 500 Celsius – hot enough to melt lead”. This, says Nasa, is because a “thick atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect”.

But, as Tom Wagner, lead scientist of Nasa’s discovery programme, said in a statement: “It is astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core.

“It will be as if we have rediscovered the planet.”