NASA Is Finally Going Back to Venus
NASA picked two new Discovery Program missions, VERITAS and DAVINCI+, to head to Venus by roughly 2030.
Venus has been the forgotten planet for a long time. Mars gets the rovers, the helicopters, the sample-return hype. Venus gets… not much, at least from NASA. That changes now. Earlier this week, on June 2, NASA announced it’s sending two new spacecraft there under its Discovery Program, and honestly, it’s about time.
The two missions are VERITAS and DAVINCI+, and they’re a nicely complementary pair. VERITAS — Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography & Spectroscopy, which is a mouthful even by NASA acronym standards — will orbit the planet and map its surface with radar, since Venus’s thick cloud cover makes normal imaging useless. The goal is to figure out whether Venus ever had plate tectonics or an ocean, and to understand why it ended up as the hellscape it is today instead of Earth’s twin.
DAVINCI+ is the one I’m more excited about. It’s going to drop a probe into Venus’s atmosphere, sampling the chemistry on the way down over about an hour before it presumably gets crushed and cooked by the surface conditions (roughly 900°F and 90 times Earth’s atmospheric pressure, for anyone who needs a reminder of why Venus missions are hard). What’s notable is that this will be the first US probe to actually enter Venus’s atmosphere since 1978’s Pioneer Venus mission. That’s over 40 years of just… not going. The Soviets did a lot of the heavy lifting on Venus exploration in the 70s and 80s with the Venera landers, and other agencies have sent orbiters since, but a dedicated US atmospheric probe has been missing from the lineup for a long time.
Each mission is getting about $500 million in funding, and both are targeting launch windows that would get them to Venus by around 2030. That’s a long runway, but that’s typical for planetary science missions — you’re talking about years of instrument development, testing, and then the actual multi-month cruise to get there.
Why Venus, why now? Part of it is scientific curiosity that’s been building for a while: Venus is basically a natural experiment in runaway greenhouse effect, and understanding how it diverged so dramatically from Earth has obvious relevance to climate science here at home. There’s also been renewed public interest thanks to the (still contested) phosphine-in-the-clouds detection from late 2020, which reignited speculation about whether Venus’s upper atmosphere could harbor some kind of microbial life. Neither VERITAS nor DAVINCI+ is designed as a life-hunting mission exactly, but the data they gather will feed directly into that debate.
It’s a nice moment for planetary science generally. Between Perseverance grinding through its science campaign on Mars, Ingenuity still flying, and now two fresh Venus missions on the books, NASA’s robotic exploration program looks about as healthy as it’s been in years. Venus just waited a very long time for its turn.