The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected the spacecraft it intends to send to Venus in the early 1930s. The chosen EnVision apparatus will examine the planet from the core to the upper atmosphere to find out how and why Venus and Earth evolved so differently, the agency announced on its website on Thursday.
ESA announced this a week after the US space agency NASA announced that it plans to send two scientific missions to Venus at the end of this decade. They should be focused on the study of the atmosphere and the surface of the planet.
“We have a new era of exploring our closest but wildly different neighbor in the solar system,” said Günther Hasinger, the agency’s scientific director, about the ESA’s new project. “Together with NASA’s newly announced missions to Venus, we will have an extremely comprehensive scientific program on this mysterious planet until the next decade,” he added.
Scientists are wondering why our nearest neighbor, through about the same size and composition as the Earth, has undergone such a dramatic climate change. Instead of being a habitable world like our planet, it has a toxic atmosphere and is surrounded by dense clouds rich in sulfuric acid.
One of the main questions that experts are looking for answers to is what Venus went through in the past when it reached its current state, and could the same fate await the Earth if it was hit by a catastrophic greenhouse effect? Is Venus still geologically active, could there have been an ocean on it, even life?
According to ESA, the EnVision spacecraft will be equipped with a set of instruments made in Europe to obtain the necessary data, including a sonar that can distinguish the planet’s underground stratification and spectrometers for examining the surface and the atmosphere. The spectrometers will monitor trace gases in the atmosphere, analyze the composition of the surface and look for any changes that could be related to signs of volcanic activity.
NASA should also provide the EnVision mission with radar to capture and map the surface of Venus. In addition, a radio science experiment will investigate the internal structure and gravitational field of the planet, as well as the structure and composition of the atmosphere.
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