Observations and explorations of Venus

The EnVision mission to Venus was officially adopted by the European Space Agency on Thursday, which means the organization has committed to getting the spacecraft Venus-bound by the early 2030s.NASA Delays Return to Earth's Evil Twin, VenusEnVision is a planned Venus orbiter designed to study the planet from its upper atmosphere to its core. Venus is in many ways a black (or mustard-colored) box for planetary evolution; thought to have formed in similar circumstances to Earth, the world is now hot, seasonless, and…

A highly anticipated mission to Venus is in trouble after NASA pulled all of its funding, save for a tiny fraction meant to keep the planetary orbiter on brittle life support as its fate hangs in the balance.Last week, NASA released its budget request for 2024 with a proposed total of $27.2 billion, of which $3.383 billion would be allocated towards planetary science. However, the space agency only requested $1.5 million for its Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission, a…

The transit of Venus (right) across the sun’s face in 2012, as seen in false color by the SDO satellite.Photo: SDO/NASA (Getty Images)It’s been 30 years since a NASA spacecraft went to Venus, a yellowish planet 67 million miles from the Sun and 141 million miles from us. Venus is often thought of as a sibling planet to Earth, both being rocky worlds close enough to the Sun to bask in its heat. And yet, at some point in their histories, the two worlds diverged in an extreme way.In 2021, NASA and the European Space Agency…

Artist’s depiction of the VERITAS Venus mission.Image: NASA/JPLNASA’s JPL is struggling with issues related to budget, staffing, and poor communications, forcing the space agency to delay a highly anticipated mission to Venus.During the annual meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group on Monday, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division Lori Glaze described the mission delay as “the most painful thing I’ve ever had to do probably in my whole life.” However, Glaze said that in trying to address challenges…

NASA’s DAVINCI mission to Venus is scheduled for launch in 2029. A new paper details this upcoming journey, a daring mission that could shed new light on the scorching hot planet’s mysterious, and potentially habitable, past.Upon its arrival at the second planet from the Sun, the probe will plunge through Venus’ atmosphere, ingesting its gases for approximately one hour before landing on the planet’s surface, according to the paper published in The Planetary Science Journal. DAVINCI is designed to act as a flying…