NASA to send spacecraft to Venus

NASA is planning to send a future fleet of spacecraft to Venus. According to NASA, the USD 4-billion Venus mission, to be launched between 2020 or 2025, could reveal more about the planet's runaway greenhouse effect, any oceans it may have had, and the volcanic activity.

Two high-altitude balloons built to hover in sulphuric acid clouds could also be part of the fleet to Venus which has more in common with Earth than any other in terms of distance from the Sun, size and mass, the US space agency has said.

And, the mission's two balloons would each carry a gondola full of scientific instruments to sniff the atmosphere at an altitude of 55 kilometers.

In fact, in 2008, NASA tasked a group of scientists to formulate goals for the mission. The team's study outlines a plan to study the planet and the mission concept includes one orbiter, two balloons and two short-lived Landers, all of which would launch into space on two Atlas V rockets.

"Our understanding of Venus is so low, we really need this armada," team leader Mark Bullock of Southwest Research Institute in Colorado was quoted as saying.

Researchers believe water was once plentiful enough to have been able to cover the entire planet in a layer 100 meters deep. But Venus’s hothouse climate eventually dried up most of this water, a process that might have also slowed and eventually stopped plate tectonics on the planet. The landers, which would only last a few hours in the intense heat, could look for evidence of minerals formed by water.

Since such hydrated minerals have a limited lifetime, they could help reveal how long Venus’s oceans might have lasted, a question that could shed light on whether life might have arisen on the planet.

The mission’s two balloons would each carry a gondola full of scientific instruments to sniff the atmosphere at an altitude of 55 kilometers.

The mission could also help reveal more about the origin of Venus’s current carbon dioxide atmosphere, which produces crushing surface pressures 90 times those on Earth.