![]() ![]() If you were miraculously heat-resistant, you would still have to contend with a surface pressure that is about 90 times that on Earth, making the experience like being nearly a mile underwater. If you stood on the surface, you would escape the corrosive acid rain, but only because rain down there is impossible: the ground bakes at more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to broil any astronaut or robot. ![]() Its cloud layers are packed with sulfuric acid-enough to chew through skin, bone and metal in moments. Venus’s thick, suffocating atmosphere is about 95 percent carbon dioxide. But with each foray, it became clearer that the planet was nightmarishly ill suited for future human exploration. and the Soviet Union each sent multiple missions there. During the 1960s and 1970s the planet amounted to an interplanetary front in the cold war as the U.S. ![]() History seemed to suggest that its time in the limelight had already come and gone. Turning Their Back on the DevilĮarlier this year it was not at all clear Venus was set for a comeback. Just a week after NASA’s eagerly anticipated announcement, the European Space Agency declared that EnVision, an orbiter that would carry out scientific surveys of select parts of the planet, would be joining the party. ![]() For the first time in three decades, NASA had chosen to go back to Venus-not once but twice. The two complementary missions are designed to study the planet’s bygone habitability. Instead, to Smrekar’s great surprise, the space agency selected both VERITAS and DAVINCI+ for flight. She and her colleagues hoped NASA would maybe greenlight a single Venus mission. “We are all desperately hoping the ‘Venus curse’ will be lifted,” Smrekar, who is the principal investigator of VERITAS, said before the announcement. The space agency had considered four missions: one to visit a moon of Neptune, another to rendezvous with a Jovian moon, and two, named DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, each independently aiming for a return to Venus. All the while, Venus-an acidic, superhot, arid and presumably lifeless wasteland-has languished in the shadows.Ī turning point came in June, when NASA announced its latest choices for new interplanetary missions as part of its Discovery exploration program. Today, a quarter of a century later, much of the global planetary science community still remains wrapped up in the so far fruitless search for Martian life. Just as Smrekar and her peers were beginning to grapple with the planet’s freshly unveiled mysteries, sensational claims of life on Mars captured the public imagination. Magellan’s explorations ended in 1994, marking the last time NASA sent a dedicated mission to Venus. Magellan’s data sharpened what has become one of the greatest unanswered questions in planetary science: What transformed Venus-the second planet from the sun, and a near twin of Earth in size and composition-into such an unearthly and apocalyptic state? Why did these two similar, neighboring planets have such staggeringly divergent stories? Smrekar recalls watching the initial radar images come in, revealing a bizarre world covered in few craters, a surfeit of volcanoes and rolling plains of frozen lava. Launched in 1989, Magellan was equipped with a radar system that peered underneath the planet’s thick clouds to map its entire surface for the first time. In some sense, her interplanetary destiny seemed preordained even before she was born: her father hails from a rural community in Pennsylvania named Venus.įittingly, the very first mission Smrekar worked on was NASA’s Venus orbiter Magellan. But instead of becoming an astronaut, she ended up as a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she worked on robotic explorers of other worlds. Like many kids, Sue Smrekar dreamed that she would one day voyage into space. ![]()
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