NASA’s Discovery Program offers scientists and engineers a chance to design their own planetary science missions and potentially have them funded by the space agency. Two such missions have just been selected, and they both involve a trip to the hottest planet in our solar system: Venus.
The characteristics of Venus suggest that it may have been the first habitable world in the solar system at one point in the distant past, but then it became an inferno. We’d all like to know why, and NASA is awarding approximately $500 million in development funding to two projects that may help answer that question. They are called DAVINCI+ and VERITAS.
DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) has two key goals: to “measure the composition of Venus’ atmosphere to understand how it formed and evolved, as well as determine whether the planet ever had an ocean,” and to “return the first high resolution pictures of the unique geological features on Venus known as “tesserae,” which may be comparable to Earth’s continents, suggesting that Venus has plate tectonics.”
VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) aims to map the surface of Venus “to determine the planet’s geologic history and understand why it developed so differently than Earth.” It will also “map infrared emissions from Venus’ surface to map its rock type, which is largely unknown, and determine whether active volcanoes are releasing water vapor into the atmosphere.”
“We’re revving up our planetary science program with intense exploration of a world that NASA hasn’t visited in over 30 years,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. “Using cutting-edge technologies that NASA has developed and refined over many years of missions and technology programs, we’re ushering in a new decade of Venus to understand how an Earth-like planet can become a hothouse.”
We have a while to wait before these missions get off the ground, with NASA predicting they will be ready to launch at some point between 2028 and 2030. NASA also intends to include some technology demonstrations on-board each mission. DAVINCI+ will carry the Compact Ultraviolet to Visible Imaging Spectrometer (CUVIS) built by Goddard, which will “make high resolution measurements of ultraviolet light using a new instrument based on freeform optics.” VERITAS will carry the Deep Space Atomic Clock-2, built by JPL. It’s an ultra-precise clock signal generator, and NASA hopes the tech “will ultimately help enable autonomous spacecraft maneuvers and enhance radio science observations.”
