A proposed new mission to Venus (earthsky.org)
Posted by Paul Scott Anderson in Space | July 12, 2020
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.
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more: https://earthsky.org/space/veritas-mission-venus-surface-interior-geology
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