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NASA is planning to return to Venus. It’s about time. - The Washington Post
Jun 09, 2021 1 min, 22 secs

NASA announced last week that it has decided to send not one but two spacecraft missions to Venus.

The plan delighted those of us in the planetary science community who have long advocated for a return to the planet.

Certainly, these missions will dramatically change our view of Venus: VERITAS will characterize the surface with radar like never before, searching for evidence of geological activity today; DAVINCI+ will measure the composition of the atmosphere to establish how the planet formed and evolved (and perhaps whether the planet really contains phosphine, a chemical tentatively detected in Venus’s atmosphere last year with telescopes on Earth, and which some consider a potential “biosignature”).

Instead of blue skies, Venus has a toxic, carbon dioxide atmosphere under a stifling layer of sulfuric acid clouds that blanket the entire planet.

Measurements by NASA’s Pioneer Venus probe in the 1970s found chemical evidence that the planet may once have had an Earth ocean’s worth of water.

But whereas modern Earth abounds with life, modern Venus today is one of the least hospitable locales in the entire solar system.

After a golden era of Venus exploration in the 1960s through to the mid-1980s (which saw more than 30 missions from the United States and the Soviet Union dispatched to the so-called second planet), a consensus developed that Venus at some point fell into a “runaway greenhouse” state.

Sophisticated climate modeling suggests the planet might have escaped an early period of overheating, instead remaining clement and hosting oceans for several billion years.

Which raises the question: If Venus really was Earth-like for much of its history, was the second planet unlucky?

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