SPACE RACE 3.0
Venus Wins Stunning Third New Mission, This Time from Europe
EnVision will follow NASA’s DAVINCI+ and VERITAS
By Meghan Bartels, SPACE.com on June 12, 2021
Venus scientists have long complained that the planet wasn’t getting its due in robotic investigators. But those days are over: space agencies have announced three new missions to Earth’s mysterious twin in just over a week.
On June 2, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency would pursue two new Venus missions dubbed DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, aiming to launch the spacecraft between 2028 and 2030. Today (June 10), the European Space Agency (ESA) joined the rush to Venus, announcing that it would launch a mission dubbed EnVision to the planet in the early 2030s.
“A new era in the exploration of our closest, yet wildly different, Solar System neighbour awaits us,” Günther Hasinger, ESA’s director of science, said in a statement. “Together with the newly announced NASA-led Venus missions, we will have an extremely comprehensive science programme at this enigmatic planet well into the next decade.”
The mission was chosen over an astrophysics project called Theseus, which would have studied very distant gamma-ray bursts and other transient events, with the goal of understanding the life cycle of the very first stars, according to ESA.
The new mission won’t be Europe’s first visit to our neighboring world: ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft orbited the world from 2005 to 2014, studying the planet’s thick atmosphere, which is rich in carbon dioxide.
EnVision will also orbit Venus, but its instruments will be able to get a deeper look at the planet than those onboard Venus Express did. The spacecraft’s tools will include a sounder to investigate layers within the planet, spectrometers to analyze gases in Venus’ atmosphere and compounds on its surface, a radar instrument to map the planet’s surface, and a radio science experiment that will probe the planet’s structure and gravity field, according to ESA.
Although the project is led by ESA, the spacecraft’s radar instrument will come from NASA. “EnVision’s VenSAR will provide a unique perspective with its targeted studies of the Venus surface, enriching the roadmap of Venus exploration,” Adriana Ocampo, EnVision program scientist at NASA, said in a NASA statement.
Meanwhile, NASA’s VERITAS mission (short for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy) will generate a global map of the topography of Venus. The data will be a vital upgrade compared to what we have from NASA’s Magellan mission, which used a much older version of the technology to map Venus between 1989 and 1994.
DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging) will be the only one of these new missions to venture through Venus’ atmosphere. The spacecraft includes a main orbiter plus a probe that will travel all the way down through the planet’s atmosphere to its surface, gathering measurements of how the atmosphere changes with depth.
EnVision will launch after the two NASA projects, with ESA officials evaluating Ariane 6 launch windows in 2031, 2032 and 2033. The spacecraft will then take 15 months to reach Venus and another 16 months to reach its final orbit.
Taken together, the three new missions will be a powerful tool for scientists looking to better understand how Earth and Venus started out so similar but became such different worlds, Tom Wagner, NASA’s Discovery Program scientist, said in the NASA statement.
“The combined results of EnVision and our Discovery missions will tell us how the forces of volcanism, tectonics and chemical weathering joined together to create and sustain Venus’ runaway hothouse climate.”
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Meghan Bartels is a science journalist based in New York City.
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Quirks & Quarks·Analysis
Europe and NASA to send three new spacecraft to Venus
Three missions will be heading to our nearest neighbour to study its atmosphere and geology
The European Space Agency has announced it will be launching its own mission to Venus that will join two American spacecraft announced earlier this month, to explore our sister planet. It is part of a broad effort to solve the mystery of why a world so much like ours turned out so differently.
The European mission, called EnVision, will orbit Venus and probe the surface with radar, looking for signs of volcanic activity both past and present. Volcanoes are believed to be the source of a planet's atmosphere and the atmosphere of Venus is incredibly different from ours and that of Mars.
If you have felt the intense heat when you open the door of an oven that has been baking at 200 C, that would be considered a cold day on Venus. The temperature on the surface is more than twice that, an unimaginable 464 C — higher than the melting point of lead.
Any spacecraft we send there has little chance of surviving for long. The only craft to land on Venus were the Russian Venera series. In fact, Venera 3 was the first spacecraft to touch another planet in 1966. However, it was a crash landing, as the spacecraft failed in the atmosphere.
Several following missions were lost due to the harsh conditions, and even those that landed successfully didn't last for long. Venera 9 operated for a full 53 minutes, but in that time was able to successfully send back the first image of Venus's surface. The Venera 13 mission survived for just a bit over two hours. In 1978, the U.S. sent its Pioneer Venus missions, and while one of the atmospheric probes survived to reach the surface, it succumbed after 45 minutes.
Given the conditions, it's highly unlikely a human will ever set foot on Venus.
We have three planets in our solar system, Venus, Earth and Mars, all made of similar rocky materials, all within the habitable zone of the sun, but with three very different environments. One is a super-hot runaway greenhouse, enshrouded in a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. One is in a permanent ice age with frigid temperatures under an extremely thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, and the other, right in the middle, is just right with nitrogen and oxygen air to breathe and live in.
The intriguing part of this mystery of why the planets are so different is the fact that at one time in the distant past, they were much more alike. There is evidence that billions of years ago Venus was cooler with liquid water on its surface and we're pretty sure that Mars was warmer and wetter as well. That means there could have been a time long, long ago when there were three blue planets.
The reason we explore other planets is to better understand our own. Venus and Mars changed from conditions that might have supported life to dramatically different environments and have remained that way ever since. The Earth on the other hand, is in a constant state of change, with ice ages and warm periods battling for dominance over geological time.
It's clear that planets are capable of dramatic global transformations. In the past, those changes have been the result of volcanic activity, impact of objects from space or the movement of continents. Now we humans are affecting the climate on a global scale in a very short time, pushing a system that has the ability to transform profoundly. Nobody is suggesting that the Earth is in danger of turning into something like Venus or Mars. But they are a vivid illustration of what can happen to a planet when its climate goes awry.
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