The Scoop

United States Continues To Outpace China With NASA’s Announcement

By • June 3, 2021 9:13 pm

The United States continues to outpace China in space exploration and NASA’s Veritas Spacecraft will take high-definition photos of Venus’ surface.

“In today’s #StateOfNASA address, we announced two new @NASASolarSystem missions to study the planet Venus, which we haven’t visited in over 30 years! DAVINCI+ will analyze Venus’ atmosphere, and VERITAS will map Venus’ surface,” NASA’s Twitter page posted on Wednesday.

The high-def photos will be used by scientists so they can check for signs if there was once water on the planet. Venus’ surface temperature is 900 degrees fahrenheit and can easily melt lead.

Venus is known as the hottest planet in our solar system filled with volcanoes.

Dr. James Garvin is the principal investigator for DAVINCI+ and Dr. Sue Smrekar is the VERITAS principal

“For me personally and for our team on DAVINCI+, carrying the name of Leonardo to explore Venus, this mystery exoplanet next door. It’s just mind-boggling. We’re going to go back in time to understand a world that’s been a lost horizon. And by bringing ourselves there with the best of the technologies, we have, our measurement systems, we’re going to open up the Venus frontier for everyone. And the people of the planet Earth will go with us,” Dr. James Garvin said.

“I think it must be like what it means to get on a rocket and be strapped in and blast off away from Earth’s gravity. It’s just been an incredible ride. We are super excited. The entire team, in fact, the entire Venus community, we won the double lottery. VERITAS, DAVINCI+ together. It’s just amazingly exciting. We, so many of us have spent decades, in fact, working to this moment. So it’s an incredible ride and we can’t wait to get the keys and start revving up and building our spacecraft to take us to Venus,” Dr. Smrekar shared.

“Our mission is a little over two and a half years. We actually launch and fly by Venus twice to collect special atmospheric remote sensing data. We’re all about the atmosphere. We think that’s the history book of Venus that we want to read. And so we’ll make these maps of cloud motions. We’ll look at the atmosphere as we look at that of Earth. You can see the Earth here, as we launch to Venus. So we’re very excited about that. But then our final mission, we release our probe. You can see it’s being released on our trans-Venus injection after we launch, but it’ll take us about six months to get to Venus. We’ll fly by Venus twice,” Dr. Garvin continued.

“And then going around the sun will come back and we’ll release our probe two days out. And then our probe spacecraft again in an aeroshell will fly through the atmosphere for about an hour and reach the surface landing at about a speed of maybe twenty, twenty-five miles an hour. And during that time, we’ll collect thousands of data sets of a new type: chemistry, imaging composition, pressure, temperature, see the lower surface of Venus for the first time in this new way. And so the overall probe mission will be about an hour. We’ll survey the surface. We may have another couple of tens of minutes and then our spacecraft will play all that data back. So that’s our mission lifetime,” Dr. Garvin concluded.

“And for VERITAS, we get into Venus very rapidly, about six months, and then we spend quite a bit of time going from a big orbit that goes out ten thousand kilometers and then bringing that orbit down slowly to being just a few hundred miles above the surface. It means truth. And it’s been so long since we have been to Venus that there are these ideas from about 30 years ago that I like to call myths that are still floating around about Venus. But we’ve learned so much about the Earth and other planets that they are really outdated ideas. And we are excited to bring new instruments to Venus and reveal the truth about Venus,” Dr. Smrekar added.

Cameron Shizznit


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