NASA SETS 2 MISSIONS TO STUDY VENUS AFTER 31 YEARS

NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time, too, Kenneth Chang reported for the New York Times.

On Wednesday, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, announced the agency’s latest choices for robotic planetary missions, both expected to head to Venus in the late 2020s: DAVINCI+ and VERITAS.

“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” Mr. Nelson said during his “State of NASA” address to the space agency’s workforce.

Venus is in many ways a twin of Earth — it is comparable in size, mass, and composition, and it is the planet whose orbit is the closest to Earth’s. But the history of the two planets diverged.

While Earth is moderate in temperature and largely covered with water, Venus, with a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide, is hellishly hot at 900 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface. After numerous missions by the United States and the Soviet Union to explore it in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, attention shifted elsewhere.

In the past year, a neglected Venus re-entered the planetary limelight after a team of scientists using Earth-based telescopes claimed they had discovered compelling evidence for microbes living in the clouds of Venus today where temperatures remain comfortably warm instead of scorching.

They said they had detected a molecule, phosphine, for which they could come up with no plausible explanation for how it might have formed there except as the waste product of living organisms.

But other scientists looking at the same data said they did not observe a convincing signal. Still, the finding prompted Jim Bridenstine, then NASA’s administrator, to say in September, “It’s time to prioritize Venus.”

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