NASA’s Da Vinci mission seeks to uncover the secrets of Venus

The significance of this mission lies in the fact that it is a gateway to understanding how life is created and lost in the Solar System and even beyond.

Photo: NASA

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The Venus Exploration Deep Atmosphere Noble Gases Chemistry and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission will descend through the layers of Venus’ atmosphere in 2030 in the first mission to study Venus with a spacecraft flying over the planet and lander.

“The expected scientific outcome is a new understanding of the atmosphere, surface, and evolutionary path of Venus as a potentially habitable planet similar to hot terrestrial exoplanets,” NASA scientists and engineers said in a published paper. American Astronomical Society.

The mission will take off between the summer and fall of 2029. The scientists explain that the mission consists of a spacecraft and descent field that will be launched into the Venusian atmosphere above the Alpha Region, an area they mysteriously call mountainous and tectonically distorted. , whose composition NASA hopes will reflect remnants of ancient continental crust.

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“The probe will land in the Alpha Reggio mountains, but there is no need to operate it after landing, as all necessary scientific data will be retrieved before it reaches the surface,” Stephanie Getty, principal investigator at Goddard, told AFP. as mentioned. . “If we survive a drop of about 12 m/s, we could have up to 17-18 minutes of surface operation under ideal conditions.” No previous mission in Venus’ atmosphere has measured chemistry and none has photographed a landing on Venus’s surface.

The significance of this mission lies in the fact that it is a gateway to understanding how life is created and lost in the Solar System and even beyond. Scientists maintain the hypothesis that Venus was habitable in the past and that its history, at least initially, has similarities with Earth, for example in the water inventory.

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This, although supported, is not a consensus. NASA itself admits that there are models that suggest, on the contrary, that Venus never condensed the oceans. Although observations of these planets have provided insight into the composition of the planet’s general atmosphere, geological history, and geodynamics, the inner planets are still poorly understood.

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