European Space Agency Prepares for a Venus Flyby Through EnVision Probe

The European Space Agency (ESA) said that EnVision would be the next orbiter to visit Venus in the 2030s after a U.S. space agency revealed its plan to visit Earth's twin.

NASA chose two missions to Venus, Earth's closest neighbor, earlier this year. The U.S. space agency chose the missions DAVINCI+ and VERITAS for their scientific promise and the practicality of their development plans. Each of these missions, which will launch between 2028 and 2030, will receive $500 million from NASA.

EnVision to Study Venus Using 2 Spectrometers

EnVision will take roughly 15 months to reach Venus after launching on an Ariane 6 rocket in 2031, The Planetary Society said. It will enter an elliptical orbit around the planet. The spacecraft will take advantage of Venus' upper atmosphere to slow down and orbit around 373 miles from the planet's surface over the next 16 months, allowing it to monitor Venus for years with its cutting-edge equipment.

While most planetary orbiter missions can use standard spectrometers to determine the composition of an object's surface and atmosphere, Venus' dense clouds make seeing its surface and lower atmosphere nearly tricky. However, Venus's thick atmosphere is transparent to a few wavelengths of light, and EnVision will use custom-made spectrometers to hunt for these small windows of opportunity.

Venus' surface and lower atmosphere will be studied with a medium-resolution infrared spectrometer. Meanwhile, an ultraviolet spectrometer will check Venus' sulphuric acid clouds and the atmosphere above them.

EnVision to Study Venus' Past By Checking Out Rock Composition

The medium-resolution infrared spectrometer developed by EnVision will scan minerals on Venus' surface and determine the rock composition. This will assist astronomers in determining whether or not sure of Venus' rocks formed in the presence of significant amounts of water.

All of Venus' impact craters developed during the previous 700 million years, according to NASA's Magellan spacecraft, which surveyed the planet in the early 1990s. This suggests that Venus' surface had been entirely altered by a global catastrophe prior to then, but the details of what transpired are still a mystery. EnVision's ground-penetrating radar will allow scientists to view topography up to a kilometer beneath Venus' surface, allowing them to spot buried craters, layers of lava flows, and other evidence from the last four billion years.

The radar will also look at tesserae, which are severely deformed terrain that may move like Earth's continents, and are likely one of Venus's earliest areas. If this theory is correct, instead of detecting a clear border dividing the two landforms, EnVision's radar will observe them bend and continue beneath the neighboring lava plains. EnVision will also get a high-resolution radar from NASA, which will be used to scan Venus's surface features, including tesserae.

Nobody knows what tesserae are made of or how they are formed yet. EnVision's spectrometers and radars will work together to figure out what they are and how Venus' surface has evolved through time.

European Astronomers to Check Venus' Interior Using Gravitational Field

By monitoring Venus' gravitational field, EnVision will contribute to the answers to these issues. Changes in gravity will affect the spacecraft's location and velocity as it passes through the denser and hollower areas of Venus. The spacecraft's radio communications sensor will record these smaller motions, allowing scientists to estimate its gravitational field and, from it, the likely size of its core, as well as whether its mantle is as iron-rich as Earth's or more so.

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