NASA’s DAVINCI mission will launch in 2029 to reach the surface of Venus

The spacecraft is expected to explore the layers of Venus’s atmosphere and reach its surface by June 2031. The DAVINCI mission will be able to capture data about Venus that scientists have been keen to measure since the early 1980s.

Only two of NASA’s missions have visited the second planet from our sun – pioneer In 1978 and Magellan In the early nineties.

The DAVINCI spacecraft will primarily serve as a flying chemistry laboratory that can measure various aspects of Venus’s atmosphere and climate and capture the first images of the planet’s high-altitude landings. The mission’s instruments will also be able to map the surface of Venus and discover the composition of the mountain-like heights of Venus.

These features, called “tesserae,” may be similar to the continents on Earth, which means Venus may have plate tectonics, according to NASA scientists.

“This set of chemistry, ecology, and lineage imaging data will paint a picture of Venus’s atmospheric layers and how they interact with the surface in the Alpha Reggio Mountains, which are twice the size of Texas,” said Jim Garvin, Director of DAVINCI. An investigator from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.

“These measurements will allow us to assess historical aspects of the atmosphere as well as detect special rock types at the surface such as granite while also looking for landscape features that can tell us about erosion or other formative processes.”

The initiative will also investigate the possibility of an ocean in Venus’ past by measuring gases and water components in the deepest part of the atmosphere. Venus may have been the first habitable world in our solar system, with an ocean and Earth-like climate — but something happened that turned it into a planet with temperatures high enough to melt lead.

Venus is likely to be preserved Stable temperatures and hosted liquid water billions of years before an event causes drastic changes to the planet, according to a 2019 study. Study author, physicist Michael Way at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York City, also co-authored the study. 2016 study About the climate and oceans on Venus in the past.

Now, Venus is a mostly dead planet with a toxic atmosphere 90 times thicker than our home planet and surface temperatures of 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius).

This illustration shows the probe after it reached the surface of Venus.  Floral heights can be seen in the background.

Since DAVINCI flies close to Venus multiple times, it will use two tools to study clouds and map altitudes from orbit. Next, a lander carrying five instruments will fall all the way to the surface.

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The descent will take about an hour and a heat shield will be used to protect the probe up to about 42 miles (67 kilometers) above the surface. Next, he’ll scrape off the shield to sample and analyze atmospheric gases. The lander will also take hundreds of images once it scans the clouds of Venus 100,000 feet (30,500 meters) above the surface.

“The probe will reach the Alpha Regio mountains, but it is not required to operate once it has landed, as all required scientific data will be taken before reaching the surface,” said Stephanie Getty, deputy principal investigator from Goddard. statement. “If we survive the landing at about 25 mph (11 m/sec), we could perform up to 17-18 minutes of operations on the surface under ideal conditions.”

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