Venus is our sister planet.
She's literally at sometimes during the year the closest thing to earth
other than our natural satellite, the moon.
And so she has a story to tell us of almost another earth, but different.
And that divergent story of how she has such a massive atmosphere.
And our planet is such a perfect place for people, is one
we want to understand and tell.
So when we see her in the night sky and often sometimes in the morning sky,
we're mesmerized by what we don't know about this world so close to home.
Is she like us?
How did she grow up to be so different?
We think Venus may have harbored liquid water oceans,
perhaps for billions of years, or if not oceans, steamy atmospheres.
Those stories of a world that should have been a lot like Earth.
Connect us in space and time.
Venus gives us a vantage point on what we don't want
Earth to be and may tell the secrets of where Earth is going.
So we're stunned by what she could tell us and can't wait to get back
NASA now has plans
to send two missions to Venus and an instrument on another one
to open our eyes to this world in this 21st
century space age. New instruments, new capabilities.
One of those missions will take the plunge
into the atmosphere, bringing the chemistry lab to the samples
to make measurements of the caliber we've been making on the surface of Mars.
But for the Venus atmosphere, others will globally map this beautiful planet
so we can compare Venus to Earth and use Venus as a clue to how we understand
potential Venus like exoplanets.
So our first mission back
to Venus, the first one Back to Venus is big atmosphere, literally -
an ocean of air is named for Leonardo da Vinci called DAVINCI.
And this mission, while flying by Venus, will also set up
two to allow a space vehicle that looks like a giant
spherical submarine
to descend through the atmosphere
and make measurements all the way from the top of the clouds to the surface,
collecting the secrets of whether Venus had oceans, the history of the atmosphere,
its kinetics dynamics, whether there were volcanoes
active recently, and then imaging all the way to the surface
over a giant mountain range system, not unlike those here on Earth.
Almost as big as the mountain ranges you find in places like Australia.
So our sister Planet Venus
has the largest atmosphere that is the ocean of air
that's around it of of any of those around the rocky planets.
That's Earth, Mars, Mercury, Venus and our moon.
So this big ocean of air is the biggest.
It's a thousand times bigger than that of our earth.
And in it is a story that awaits to be told.
And so going to that atmosphere ourselves,
bringing the instruments of the 21st century that have worked at Mars
and at the Saturn's moon Titan, that work in the Earth's atmosphere
to study the Venus atmosphere up close and in person and personally will be epic.
And then looking under the massive cloud deck at the shape of the mountains
and what they're made of as we descend closer to the surface, as we would say
in a helicopter on Earth, we can do all that with this first mission
and open our eyes to the Venus that we have not really yet
gotten to know very well.
Our engineering team on this first mission known as DAVINCI,
are basically sealing out the environment of this Venus atmosphere
from the top of the clouds where it's cold and the winds are swirling
to the deep atmosphere where it's super hot, hotter than the back of a pizza oven.
And pressure is equivalent to being almost a kilometer deep in the ocean.
That's where big submarines go.
We have to be able to transit all of those environments
in about an hour in this space vehicle that protects priceless instruments
so they can make measurements, collect samples, collect images,
measure environments.
And we have the tools now,
thanks to the technology of the 21st century, to bring all that up
close and in person to allow us to explore Venus in new ways, ways
that are more advanced than we were able in the eighties, in the seventies.
Getting to know Venus as the
kind of exoplanet we may be able to detect and study in depth
with NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope is a wonderful opportunity
to have planetary ground truth on a world
that has a big hot atmosphere close to a sun.
Relative to those, those exoplanets will be discovering
with James Webb that we're already looking at with that telescope.
So by learning about Venus up close and her workings from the cloud tops
down to the surface, we can understand what James Webb may discover
as that great vehicle of exploration explores exoplanets
that may be Venus like and perhaps more Venus like that Earth like,
because Venuses will be easier to see with Webb.
And so by getting to know Venus, the planet that grew
a big atmosphere relative to the Mars, the planet has a paltry tiny one.
We can sort of look at the
at the bookends and see where we fit in and where we might be going.
Venus may be a tale of an earth like planet that became, that lost
its habitability, which is a fragile idea of how life can gain a foothold.
So we want to understand that at Venus and look at Mars
and the ancient records of possible life or not on that world.
So these three planets are the best things.
We have to get to know how our planet fits into this beautiful solar system
and even beyond. So that's why Venus matters.
what we've seen with the missions of the nineties,
like the Magellan radar mapper, that Venus has a lot of volcanoes
and that's how planets get rid of their heat.
Earth does that a lot underwater through the mid-ocean ridges.
Venus does that apparently almost everywhere.
So we want to see
whether any of those volcanoes are active, because in all honesty, they should be.
That's the way planets work.
So we want to test that idea using not only what we can see as Venus changes,
but what the chemistry of what those volcanic eruptions could be like.
If we can read those signatures through the kind of chemical measurements
we can make by bringing the chemistry lab to Venus to see whether
she's active today or was recently active, that will change everything.
Having another volcanically active planet just next door.
Just imagine that.
So to learn more,
we can go to websites like NASA.gov slash Venus.
Alternately, you can go to Solar System, dot nasa.gov, slash Venus
to see more about these missions NASA will be launching in the next ten years,
bringing us all up close to Venus and making it a personal experience.
Come with us. Let's discover Venus together.