Planetary scientists still don't know what happened to Venus.
Venus is a hot land that is similar to Earth in size and location. Stunning flora on Earth. Their stories differed somewhere.
NASA will launch a mission later this decade to collect unprecedented observations of our sister planet. The probe will help answer the question of whether Venus harbored oceans. Is it okay? What is going on on its surface?
"Venus has always been this enigmatic sister planet."
A titanium sphere will be dropped on a Venusian day in 2031 at high noon. It will consume gasses. Experiments will be conducted. It will get hotter and hotter. We will see what Venusian mountains look like. Just one hour of observations will change our understanding of Venus.
Jim Garvin, who leads NASA's DAVINCI mission, said thatVenus has always been mysterious. He wonders why Venus looks different from Earth.
An illustraton of the DAVINCI probe, with its heat shield still attached, dropping through the Venusian atmosphere. Credit: NASA / GSFC / CI Labs / Michael Lentz
It's hard to comprehend Venus.
The world below is largely obscured by the planet's clouds. NASA used a cloud-penetrating radar to map a large part of Venus' surface in the early 1990s. Garvin said that our grasp of the world is fuzzy. The only footage ever captured from Venus' surface was returned by Soviet probes in the 70s and 80s. These machines were never able to survive for more than an hour. The pressure on Venus is about the same as it is on Earth.
Engineers aren't building the probe to survive for more than an hour as it plummets through Venus' clouds, and then hits the surface at 25 mph. Even a short trip requires a strong craft. Titanium is one of the strongest metals on the planet. The craft and its science instruments have to survive acidic clouds.
"It's a relatively tranquil fall."
Thousands of observations will be made by DAVINCI as it drops through the atmosphere. The probe will measure the air pressure and temperature every fifty feet, it will inhale and identify different gases, and it will run experiments on the sphere, such as analyzing telltale chemicals that can prove liquid water once existed or flowed on the planet. The lab is going to Venus.
The probe enters the atmosphere at a rate of 120 kilometers per hour, which is 75 miles above the ground.
The probe will no longer have a heat shield. The probe will drop through the Venusian sky after releasing a parachute and holding on to heat- resistant cables. This craft carried the probe to Venus, and then dropped it into the clouds, so that it could be used to send the data up to the DAVINCI relay spacecraft.
The probe ditches its parachute at the 40 kilometer mark. It is now freefalling through the thick atmosphere at 25 mph. Garvin said that it was a tranquil fall. The probe will continue to collect gasses and send them up to the craft above.
The carbon dioxide atmosphere is twelve times less dense than water as the probe enters a zone of immense dense pressure. The views will be foggy, but DAVINCI's cameras will identify different rock types below.
The views will be amazing. The probe will go to the mountains. The mountains of Venus will have clear images for the first time.
By the time the probe lands on Venus, the mission is done. The titanium probe can last up to 17 minutes and collect information on the Venusian surface.
The thick Venusian clouds. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
There are more than one trillion planets in the universe. Many of the smaller planets are similar to Venus. "Exo-Venuses" are what these are.
The most powerful telescope ever built will soon focus on exoplanets, which can be bright and reflective, and they're also close to their respective stars, making them easier to spot. If planetary scientists want to better understand these Venus-like worlds, they need to better understand the actual Venus next door, which is 38 million miles away.
"We have to know our Venus."
"We have to be aware of our Venus," said Garvin.
Venus had an ocean for at least 2 or 3 billion years, according to some simulations. There is a lot of time for life to change. Other exo-Venuses may have the same environments.
planetary scientists need to understand more about Venus' past. Clues about past water and beyond will be picked up by the DAVINCI probe. We've seen many images of Venus, but don't know what happened to it.
Garvin said they haven't seen anything yet.
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