The NASA discovery program will look for information on our nearest nearby area Venus in a series of two new missions. Missions should be launched inside the Calendar from 2028 to 2030 and will be awarded to $ 500 million for the development of missions. Davinci + and Veritas missions were selected in the latest round of four missions from the original NASA Discovery 2019 competition.

Davinci + represents a deep atmosphere Venus survey on noble gases, chemistry and imaging. This mission will work with James Garvin of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as a main investigator. The Goddard Space Flight Center will provide project management.

This mission aims to measure the composition of the Venus atmosphere. This would be the first American mission at the atmosphere of Venus since 1978.

This mission will include a “descent sphere” which will aim to “dive into the thick atmosphere of the planet, making precise measures of noble grains and other elements to understand why the atmosphere of Venus is a fugue Hothouse compared to Earth.”

The intention of this mission is also to deliver the first high resolution images of Tesserae on Venus. It is suggested by the memory of NASA that these images can show if / how to come to the tectonics of the plate and if Venus’ tesserae is comparable to the continents of the Earth.

In addition: Davinci + will also organize the ultraviolet compact imaging spectrometer at the Visible Imaging Spectrometer (CUVI) built by Goddard. Using Cuvis, the mission will work with “a new instrument based on a free form” to perform high resolution measurements of the ultraviolet light of Venus.

Veritas represents Venus Emissivity, radio sciences, insar, topography and spectroscopy. This mission will have Suzanne Smrékar of the NASA jet propulsion laboratory in southern California, as the main investigator. This mission will involve NASA’s propulsion laboratory, the German Aerospace Center, the Italian Space Agency and the National Studies Center of France Studies.

This mission will aim to map the surface of the planet Venus. With a synthetic opening radar, veritas “graphic surface elevations on almost all the planet.” With these data, NASA will be able to create 3D reconstructions of Topography of Venus.

The German aerospace center will provide the infrared mapper of the mission. The Italian Space Agency and the National Center for Space Studies, France, will contribute to the radar and “other parts of the mission”. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will provide project management.

Also: Veritas will host the deep spatial atomic clock. This is a tool built by the JPL, funded by the management of the Mission Space Technology of NASA. This tool generates an ultra-precise clock signal that NASA suggests that “will eventually help activate autonomous spacecraft maneuvers and improve the observations of radio sciences”.

Watch the missions unfold

We will look at the progression of NASA towards this last pair of missions in Venus through the next decade – Stay tuned! We will report all important events from here to there, launch and conclusions of the mission too!