The chief scientist of the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA, James Garvin, is the principal investigator of the proposed mission to explore Venus. The goal was to probe around its atmosphere hopeful that a new living planet will unravel. To prepare for the mission, he hired two pilots in August of 2016 to try to plunge a helicopter towards the ground to test what it was like to probe within the atmosphere of Venus. The harrowing ride that was is believed to be worth it as scientists all over the world would love to see a picture of Venus with all its beautiful details.
"The images that we will capture would be similar to the scenery in your backyard, Garvin said."
Garvin is not the only scientist who is excited about the mission to Venus. In fact, every space agency all over the world is preparing its own proposal to explore Earth's most neglected neighbors. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) will be the first one to be able to do it when they launch their Venus orbiter in 2023. The NASA of the United States might just be close behind.
Garvin alongside his colleagues are one of the many groups that will send their proposal to NASA for the Venus mission. If they get selected and awarded funding, their launch is set to be in 2025. The European Space Agency (ESA) is currently reviewing a proposal to send an orbiter in Venus. The expected take-off of such orbiter will be in 2032. Roscosmos or the Russian Space Agency is currently collaborating with the United States to send out its space experts for an expedition to Venus at any time between 2026 and 2033. The plan includes an orbiter that will be able to send back much-needed information about the planet to hopefully establish a research station that would survive the planet much longer.
This new-found interest in exploring Venus stands in stark contrast of the years these agencies have spent looking into Mars, the Moon and other planets in the galaxy. Over the last 65 years, NASA has had its eyes on Mars. It has in fact send 8 landers and 11 orbiters to the Red Planet, but they haven't sent any orbiter to Venus since 1994. This may perhaps be a result of the lack of interest on the planet. In the mid-1990s, many scientists have expressed their desire to explore Venus and submitted proposals to explore it. None of which have been approved.
But the momentum to explore the planet Venus is building partly because scientist wants to understand what makes a planet habitable. Since Venus is known as the Earth's twin until it became a hellish abode that it's surface temperature reaches 400 degrees Celsius, making it seemingly impossible for any form of life to survive. If scientists could decipher how Venus because such a dangerous planet, it would shed some light on the possibility of life existing even in rocky planets.
"This might be the beginning of a new decade in Venus," says a planetary scientist Thomas Widemann from the Paris Observatory.
