NASA Selects 2 New Missions to Venus
Both missions will help us understand how Venus became an inferno-like world.
By Matthew Humphries
(Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA's Discovery Program offers scientists and engineers a chance to design their own planetary science missions and potentially have them funded by the space agency. Two such missions have just been selected, and they both involve a trip to the hottest planet in our solar system: Venus.
The characteristics of Venus suggest that it may have been the first habitable world in the solar system at one point in the distant past, but then it became an inferno. We'd all like to know why, and NASA is awarding approximately $500 million in development funding to two projects that may help answer that question. They are called DAVINCI+ and VERITAS.