Two new missions to Venus, Earth’s closest planetary neighbour, have been announced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
The two missions, to be launched in 2028 and 2030, have been granted $500 million in funding, and will be travelling to the planet to study its geology and atmosphere. The last probe to travel to Venus was the Magellan orbiter, in 1990.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said: ‘These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world, capable of melting lead at the surface.’
Venus, despite being further from the Sun than Mercury (the planet closest to the Sun) is the hottest planet in the Solar System, thanks to a greenhouse effect, which sees temperatures on the surface reach 500 degrees Celsius.
The two missions will study how Venus’s atmosphere formed, and try to determine whether it has a system of plate tectonics, similar to the Earth’s, or whether it ever had an ocean.
[Image: Bruno Albino from Pixabay]