(light dramatic music)
Venus.
Other than the moon, it's the brightest object
in the night sky.
Captivating men and women for millennia.
Named for the Roman goddess of beauty,
the heavenly orb has an ugly side too.
(thunder rumbling)
It's a very hellish place.
Sulfuric acid at the surface.
Seems to be an inherently volcanic world
with an atmosphere that ran amok.
But Earth's sister planet
may not have always been so inhospitable.
We think that Venus may once have looked more
like Earth in the past.
Now, after decades of neglect,
planetary scientists turn their attention
back to the solar system's second planet.
To unlock secrets of our world's past,
and perhaps what's ahead.
Venus is the once and future Earth.
Prepare to voyage to Venus.
(dramatic whooshing)
(light dramatic music)
Okay, Peter, we copy.
We are proceeding into the IOSPI lock checkup.
NASA is heading out into deep space once again.
With an initial price tag of $500 million each,
two new programs, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS,
will launch planetary probes designed
to visit Venus within a decade.
We hope these missions will further our understanding
of how Earth evolved and why it's currently habitable
when others in our solar system are not.
By gathering new data about Venus,
scientists also expect to learn about Earth
and the evolution of life.
Two rocky bodies, roughly the same size,
astronomical next door neighbors
both formed about four and a half billion years ago.
How did two worlds with so much in common
become so different?
It's this amazing cosmic accident, right?
That we have two planets that are so much alike.
It's like every scientist's dream that you have
like a control case.
Venus is very special.
She's the most Earth-like world
that we know the least about.
She has this massive atmosphere,
an atmosphere that is 100 times that of Earth's,
which is layered and structured
and telling a story that we haven't read yet.
Inspired by the Italian artist,
Leonardo DaVinci, Garvin and the team created
an acronym to name their mission
and honor the original Renaissance man.
I was always struck by him.
His writings in science, engineering, art,
all came together with imaginative creation.
Some of which even look like spacecraft
that could go to Venus.
Fittingly, now one bearing his name,
will make that journey.
Currently scheduled to launch in 2029.
The plans include a carrier spacecraft
which will fly by Venus twice
before releasing the descent probe,
protected by a heat shield seven feet in diameter.
That will carry us into that atmosphere,
handle the peak heating of that entry
and then jettison the heat shield
so our probe will be exposed to the atmosphere
in the upper clouds around 70 kilometers.
And that's when our mission begins.
That multi-pronged mission,
to examine the elemental properties
of the Venusian atmosphere, image and identify
the character of the landscape,
and ultimately land on the surface.
We are sending what I like to call
a flying rover chemistry lab.
And it will be in the form of a special probe,
not unlike a diving bell that you would need
to go into the deep ocean.
That vehicle is designed to handle environmental changes
that go from super cold and almost no atmosphere
to super hot and high pressure
all in the period of about an hour.
That's tough.
(dramatic whooshing) (light dramatic music)
Three, two, one. -: Almost 60 years ago,
Mariner 2 rocketed planetary science into high gear
when it became the first spacecraft to successfully
visit another planet with a flyby of Venus.
The Soviet Union's Venera Missions landed
multiple probes on the surface.
Brief encounters which exposed the planet's desolation.
The Pioneer Multiprobe was the last American mission
to enter and study the atmosphere of Venus in 1978.
And the Magellan spacecraft, deployed from
the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989,
was the first to map the entire surface of Venus,
revealing volcanic activity.
However, Mars soon stole the spotlight
of planetary exploration.
In part, because of the greater engineering challenges
presented by Venus.
Venus presents a very tough challenge:
a big atmosphere, hard to get into,
hard to survive at the surface where the pressure
and temperature are equivalent to being half a mile
deep in the ocean at temperatures that are twice
the temperature of your oven.
But the success of the Mars programs
serve as scientific building blocks
and inform what's possible elsewhere.
What we've done at Mars is shown the next generation
of exploration techniques, instruments,
vehicles, science questions, computing,
models of states of past climates.
We can now apply what we've learned in Mars
and in Earth to Venus.
What a perfect time.
Including cutting edge capabilities
ready to be employed by these two missions,
VERITAS and DAVINCI+.
This is the first full-scale titanium test unit
of DAVINCI+, about a meter across.
We've tested this to 450 degrees centigrade
and have confirmation that our instruments inside this,
which look like this at small scale
all packed in there underneath this outer pressure vessel,
will do well.
You can see one of the inlet systems here
that will be ingesting gases multiple times
through the transect of the atmosphere, some in the clouds,
and then every couple of hundred meters
as we come out of the clouds.
So we'll be literally tasting Venus all the way down,
using a system like this.
The five primary science instruments
will work like the five senses of the human body.
(light music)
Two analytical spectrometers to pinpoint
the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
The Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation, or VASI,
which will measure winds, pressure and temperature.
A student experiment named VFox to investigate the cycle
of small levels of oxygen in the atmosphere.
And the Venus Descent Imager, known as VENDI,
located at the bottom.
The instruments need to fit together almost
like jigsaw puzzles to make the most of the volume
that we have within this very special envelope
of our descent sphere.
We're gonna take a lot of that instrument capability
and apply it to the big questions about Venus.
Questions that scientists
have been posing for years.
(grounds rustling)
(light music)
In many respects, the investigations of Mars and Venus
are looking for the same thing:
evidence of water, present today,
or perhaps long long ago.
We wanna understand if Venus, which we think of
as Earth's evil twin, was more like her identical twin
in the distant past.
That means vast surface oceans
that could have harbored life.
While life on Earth was rising and evolving,
it's possible that Venus was also a place
that those processes could happen.
We're gonna look for chemical fingerprints
that may indicate that Venus was once habitable in the past.
So, by reading these records on Venus today,
we might be able to infer that Venus was a nice place
to live in the past.
Maybe a place that we'd wanna visit.
Understanding Venus's story
can aid the search for life outside our solar system,
as astronomers discover new planets around other stars.
By studying Venus and discovering if
it was truly habitable, we might discover that
the habitable zone boundaries are fuzzy.
You know, maybe you can have habitability
beyond those boundaries in ways that are surprising.
High resolution images will help categorize
the makeup of Venus's surface materials.
We wanna look for things like granites.
Granites are really interesting because, at least on Earth,
they form from water-rock interactions
and also cotton and building processes.
(thunder rumbling)
DAVINCI+'s camera work will include
more than static landscapes.
VENDI will create dynamic 3D relief models
at an incredible meter in scale.
Layering images taken all along its descent.
A system already successfully tested
by matching the probe's drop speed in a helicopter.
VENDI will be looking out the south pole of the probe.
What the team calls the Eye of Venus,
a window made of sapphire.
This little piece is a really important piece of hardware.
We've tested this in Venus-relevant conditions
and it works great.
As the probe is falling through the atmosphere
this is what the camera's gonna be looking through,
and we're gonna get spectacular views of the surface.
We're gonna be taking thousands of images
all the way down to the surface.
We're gonna be able to distinguish
different mineral types.
It is very exciting once we get below the cloud deck.
You might think this is a small window,
but I don't know, I looks pretty big to me.
This is gonna be a new world exposed.
If DAVINCI+ will explore Venus close-up,
VERITAS, launching in 2028,
will examine the planet from a distance in orbit.
We will enhance the science that can be obtained
from both missions by having these two missions together.
So we can compare the visual images
that they will take to our radar images
and that will enhance our ability to interpret
the radar images, just as the global context
that we provide enhances their ability
to interpret their local observations.
Three decades ago, Smrekar collaborated
on the successful Magellan mapping mission.
Now using radar technologies developed to study Earth,
VERITAS will return data from Venus
100 times more detailed than its predecessors.
The size that VERITAS wants to accomplish
is looking at the planet holistically.
We want to understand what makes rocky planets tick.
We wanted to understand the geologic engine
inside the planet, how that interacts with the surface,
how it drives volcanism, how it drives faulting,
and what that means for the atmosphere.
Examining landscape features
also found on Earth.
Like fault lines, volcanic calderas and lava flows,
and searching for evidence of subduction.
That's when tectonic plates edge under one another
into the hot molten interior.
VERITAS will test theories about
the formation of continents
(light dramatic music) VERITAS will help us
tell Earth's origin story.
That process of subduction led to
the formation of continents.
Continents may have changed the composition of the oceans.
Ultimately, though,
it's about the water here on Earth and there on Venus.
So VERITAS will employ a spectrometer
designed to see through the clouds and map rock composition.
Also looking for granite, like here on Earth.
By looking for the chemical fingerprints
of continental analogs on Venus,
we will also be pinning down that history of surface water.
You know, we'll get a better idea of how old
those continents are, if they have the right composition
to have formed the presence of water.
And we'll also look for water coming
out of the interior today,
that would be just hugely important for understanding
the evolution of the history of water
on the surface and in the atmosphere of Venus.
But those ancient oceans are long since gone,
and the teams of VERITAS and DAVINCI+ want to know why.
Why the divergent pathway relative to our Earth?
Why didn't she stay cool and neat and oceanic?
What went wrong? What went right for her history?
How can we disentangle that history?
Because that's important.
It may be that Venus is a magic mirror
that's reflecting the future of Earth back to our planet.
So these same processes involving, you know,
the shutdown of geological activity as the planet cools.
These are also gonna play out on Earth
billions of years into the future.
Understanding Venus better
should cast light on Earth's present and future states, too.
We can validate and improve our climate models
that we're using to study climate change here on Earth
by applying those models to Venus.
The Venus system is different, it's a lot more extreme,
but if our models, when we take them from Earth
and we apply them to Venus, if they don't break,
then that means those models are more robust.
Some have theorized, as the oceans boiled away,
microorganisms may have migrated to the upper levels
of the cloud decks.
In 2020, an international team of researchers
announced the discovery of small levels of phosphene.
A potential bio-signature in the Venusian atmosphere.
Analysis was reached using Earth-based radio telescopes.
Questions about the phosphene news persist,
and even the lead researcher suggested
the best way to test their results was to go to Venus.
So maybe the only thing to do is to send a spacecraft
that can really sample and see if there
are life forms there.
Now that's something VERITAS and DAVINCI+
will do, providing an unprecedented database to learn from.
The experts that build the models
can test their theories with real data.
If there are intriguing chemical signatures there,
we will be able to confirm that they are there,
but also understand the context of the environment
that we found them in.
Piece that VERITAS will contribute to
is understanding volcanism.
That's one hypothesis that has been put forward
as a way to produce phosphine in the atmosphere.
For those involved with these new
missions to Venus, the green lights
validate years of persistence,
passionate work and proposal refinements.
Doing planetary science as a career
takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of fortitude.
This is beyond words.
We are so ready to bring Venus into focus for humanity
because we think she has a story we have to tell.
(light dramatic music)