A proposed new mission to Venus
A proposed new mission to Venus
Paul Scott Anderson in SPACE | July 12, 2020
The proposed VERITAS mission to Venus is one of the finalists for NASA’s Discovery Program. If selected, it will revolutionize our knowledge about the planet’s geology and how this formerly habitable world became a fiery wasteland.
Venus is often called Earth’s sister planet, and it’s also our closest planetary neighbor. It’s about the same size and density as Earth. But, beyond that, Venus is a very different – and hostile – world. While Earth is a garden, Venus is hot enough on its surface to melt lead. Scientists think that Venus used to be more Earthlike a few billion years ago, when the solar system was younger. Something happened that altered its evolutionary course forever, but exactly what that was is still not well understood. Somehow, Venus changed from being a clement world, possibly with oceans, to the cloud-enshrouded, searing hellhole we know today. A proposed new NASA mission, called VERITAS, would study Venus’ geology, both below and on the surface. It would try to answer fundamental questions about how this world ended up being so very different from our own.
The latest overview of the VERITAS mission was posted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on July 8, 2020.
VERITAS – Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography & Spectroscopy – is one of the four proposed missions being considered for NASA’s Discovery Program. Suzanne Smrekar, principal investigator of VERITAS at JPL, stated:
Venus is like this cosmic gift of an accident. You have these two planetary bodies – Earth and Venus – that started out nearly the same but have gone down two completely different evolutionary paths, but we don’t know why.
Venus is a rocky world like Earth, but its surface is completely obscured by a thick, dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. Temperatures at the surface never fall below about 900 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius), and the pressure, similar to that deep in the oceans on Earth, would quickly crush humans. The clouds contain sulfuric acid. Not exactly the most hospitable place in the solar system, although higher up in the atmosphere, temperatures and pressures are much more clement.
VERITAS would peer through the dense clouds with radar and a near-infrared spectrometer, to create 3-D global maps of the planet and analyze what the surface is composed of (we do know already that most of the surface is volcanic basalt). By measuring Venus’ gravitational field, VERITAS could also determine the structure of the planet’s interior. VERITAS would provide the most detailed analysis of Venus ever obtained by an orbiting spacecraft.
If selected, VERITAS would launch sometime in 2026.
