Editor’s note: Paul K. Byrne is Associate Professor of Planetary Science, North Carolina State University. This is an excerpt of an article posted at The Conversation.
RALEIGH – NASA is finally headed back to Venus. On June 2, 2021, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency had selected two winners of its latest Discovery class spacecraft mission competition, and both are headed to the second planet from the Sun.
I’m a planetary scientist and a self-confessed Venus evangelist, and here’s why I’m so excited that humanity is going back to Venus.
This is the first time since the Magellan mission in 1989 that NASA has committed to sending spacecraft to study the shrouded planet just next door. With the data these two Venus missions – called VERITAS and DAVINCI+ – will collect, planetary scientists can start tackling one of the biggest mysteries in the solar system: Why is Venus, a planet almost the same size, density and age of Earth, so very different from the world humanity calls home?
An Earth gone wrong?
Venus is a rocky planet about the same size as Earth, but despite these similarities, it is a brutal place. Although only a little closer to the Sun than Earth, a runaway greenhouse effect means that it’s extremely hot at the surface – about 870 F (465 C), roughly the temperature of a self-cleaning oven. The pressure at the surface is a crushing 90 times the pressure at sea level on Earth. And to top it off, there are sulfuric acid clouds covering the entire planet that corrode anything passing through them.
But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Venus is that it may have once looked a lot like Earth.
Want more? Read the full article on The Conversation.
