NASA Selects Two Missions to Visit Venus for the First Time to Unveil Secrets of Earth's Evil Twin

NASA said on Wednesday that it will return to Venus for the first time in more than 30 years, with two new $500 million missions set to launch within the next ten years.

The missions DAVINCI and VERITAS will travel to the planet known as "Earth's evil twin," as part of NASA's Discovery program, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the State of the Agency address per ScienceMag.

'The missions aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world when it has so many other characteristics similar to ours - and may have been the first habitable world in the solar system, complete with an ocean and Earth-like climate,' NASA said in a release posted on its website.

NASA To Send DAVINCI To Investigate Venus Atmosphere

DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) will study Venus' atmosphere. It will share more about how the planet was created and evolved and whether or not it ever had an ocean.

It will also search for noble gases in its atmosphere, including helium, neon, argon, and krypton, to determine why it is a 'runaway hothouse' compared to Earth.

DailyMail said scientists made headlines in 2020 when they traced amounts of phosphine gas, a colorless gas produced mostly by certain microbes in the absence of oxygen.

However, such hopes may have been shattered when another DailyMail report claimed that the substance discovered was 'regular' sulfur dioxide rather than phosphine.

The New York Times noted that the tools used to analyze noble gases may also assess whether phosphine exists.

DAVINCI+ will also return the first high-resolution photographs of Venus' tesserae, which are thought to be similar to Earth's continents.

"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," said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science, in the statement by NASA.

Zurbuchen continued: "Our goals are profound. It [does not just understand] the evolution of planets and habitability in our own solar system, but extending beyond these boundaries to exoplanets, an exciting and emerging area of research for NASA."

NASA To Send VERITAS to Understand History of Venus

VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) will map the surface of Venus and investigate its geologic history in an attempt to understand why it developed so differently than Earth.

NASA explained that it will use a synthetic aperture radar to 'record surface elevations over virtually the entire planet to produce 3D reconstructions of topography' to assess if plate tectonics and volcanic activity are still active on the planet.

Tom Wagner, a NASA Discovery Program scientist, said the combined results of these missions will reveal more about the planet from the clouds in its sky to the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its core.

NPR said the two missions would be the first American spacecraft to visit Venus since 1978 when the Orbiter and the Multiprobe carried various equipment to study plasma and solar wind in the planet's dense atmosphere.

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