Journey to Venus

01We live on Earth, right?

02The ocean world, trees, you know, condominiums.

03The closest planet next door is the planet known as Venus, the morning star very often in literature.

04We can see her.

05She's the second brightest thing in the sky other than the moon.

06It gives you a sense that we're not alone in our little solar system.

07So what is Venus?

08Venus ought to be a lot like us.

09She's in just the right neighborhood.

10And yet she isn't.

11So something changed.

12Understanding that is important, understanding our own destiny, because as we look beyond our solar system and start to see worlds that we hope are like us, they may be more like Venus.

13And so that may tell us about how planets change their life histories.

14So we need Venus as a clue to our destiny and to read the records beyond our solar system.

15This is NASA's Curious Universe.

16Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

17I'm Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

18Venus is the second planet from the sun in our solar system.

19It's sometimes called Earth's twin because it's similar in size and density.

20But it's currently far too hot on its surface to support life as we know it or liquid water.

21In fact, Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system with a thick, toxic atmosphere.

22And while those characteristics mean it's an unlikely candidate for life now, scientists think Venus might have been a lot more like Earth many, many years ago.

23In an exhilarating announcement earlier this year, two NASA missions were selected to fly to Venus in the next decade, called Da Vinci and Veritas.

24These missions will allow scientists to learn more about what this strange and inhospitable planet is like now, and if it was similar to Earth in the past, which could tell us more about our future.

25So let's go to Venus.

26We'll be following Jim Garvin, principal investigator of the Da Vinci mission, as he takes us through the atmosphere and to the surface of our sibling planet.

27So Venus is a rocky planet, so it has a solid surface.

28It's about the size of Earth, 10% less in size.

29It has 450 million square kilometers of landscape.

30But it also has a massive atmosphere.

31And the Venus atmosphere is like no other in the solar system.

32Because it's dense, massive, super hot near the surface, like hotter than your oven.

33The surface temperature, 950 Fahrenheit in most places.

34Maybe 900 at the top of the biggest mountains.

35Big clouds, billowing clouds, extend for miles.

36At one point the clouds will get a little nasty.

37They'll be made of stuff we would not want to breathe.

38Sulfuric acid and other caustic chemicals that we use to clean things on Earth while they're in the clouds of Venus.

39We'll come out of the clouds into the hazes and below us will be the landscapes of Venus.

40Rolling planes we'd have in the oceans.

41Presence of mountains as tall as Mount Everest.

42Valleys, ridges, volcanoes.

43Things we've never seen before.

44New landscape types we do not have on Earth.

45If you were able to breathe in the atmosphere of Venus, it might smell like rotten eggs.

46Yuck.

47Of course you'd have to withstand the intense heat, pressure, and toxic fumes in order to get a good whiff.

48And as we're descending, the surface pressure and temperature is going to be getting extreme.

49Like being half a mile deep in the ocean, but we're in a gas.

50But that gas is behaving more like water than like a regular gas.

51So it sloshes around.

52The carbon dioxide in the deepest part of Venus's atmosphere is what's known as a supercritical fluid.

53It's a state between a gas and a liquid.

54Not only would that CO2 be difficult to walk around in, it's also a key ingredient of why Venus is so hot.

55Heat from the sun gets trapped in the planet's dense atmosphere, a condition known as the greenhouse effect.

56And so that's the Venus we see.

57She's telling us a story, but her books are a little harder to read.

58Venus is this incredible cosmic accident.

59No two bodies are more similar in our solar system than Venus and Earth.

60This gives us a great opportunity to try out any theory of how things work.

61We can take those theories and apply them to Venus and we learn something.

62Now that we've traveled through the atmosphere, the next stop on our grand tour of Venus is the rocky surface of the planet.

63My name is Suis Mercar.

64I'm the principal investigator for the Veritas mission.

65I'm a Venus planetary geophysicist.

66Venus is just an incredibly complicated planet which has so many similarities to Earth.

67Now, one really big and perhaps underappreciated similarity is the age of its surface.

68If we look at the surface of Mercury or Mars, they're covered with impact craters.

69That means those surfaces have been around for billions of years.

70So Venus, it only has about a thousand impact craters.

71If you account for the surface area of the ocean, Earth has about the same number.

72That makes it a place where we expect geologic processes to still be active.

73It really gives us a great laboratory to study active geology.

74The lack of craters on Venus and on Earth shows us they are both planets with relatively young surfaces.

75This means there are active processes on Venus like quakes and volcanism reshaping the surface.

76And this is a process scientists are eager to learn more about.

77Most of the planet's surface is covered in volcanic features, many of which look like those we find here on Earth.

78But there are also crazy features.

79For example, channels, which we think are formed by lava flow eroding the surface.

80But those channels go for literally a thousand miles and are only like a mile wide.

81Venus is one of our closest neighbors in the universe.

82So it makes sense that we would want to learn more.

83There have already been several missions to Venus.

84But because of the harsh nature of its atmosphere, they could only tell us so much.

85In the dawn of the space age, Venus was the it planet.

86There was just spacecraft after spacecraft heading to Venus.

87Some made it, some failed.

88But it was the planet that we thought had swamps and dense vegetation and exciting aliens as captured in sci-fi.

89It was actually the place where the first robotic spacecraft flew by another planet.

90Those missions, the United States mission Pioneer Venus and the Soviet missions Venera and Vega, they visited the atmosphere and surface with technologies largely from the 1970s.

91And just think back to the 70s.

92Did we have cell phones?

93Nope.

94Did we have personal computers?

95Nip.

96Electric cars?

97Nope.

98Those technologies showed us the Venus we see today.

99A limited picture of a masterpiece unfinished.

100Because Venus is hard.

101The last U.S.

102mission to Venus was the Magellan mission, which reached Venus orbit in 1990 and operated until 1994.

103Jim and his team proposed going back to Venus with the Da Vinci mission four times before it was selected in 2021 alongside the Veritas mission.

104So after many years, actually a decade or so of trying, we are so privileged to have been selected to fly a mission named for Leonardo da Vinci, the great renaissance person who was able to stitch science, technology, engineering, and dreams and curiosity all together.

105We would ideally launch in 2029 and fly by Venus twice in 2030 before we take the plunge in June of 2031.

106And our plunge will take an hour through the entire atmosphere.

107And then if we're fortunate and lucky and Venus cooperates, we may get a little data as we sit on the surface.

108I'm Jada Arne and I'm one of the deputy PIs of the Da Vinci mission to Venus.

109Jada, alongside Jim, is part of the team conceptualizing, preparing, and eventually launching the probe to Venus.

110It will consist of two parts.

111Both will collect new and exciting information that will help us better understand this mysterious planet.

112It's a really exciting concept.

113There's a spacecraft and the spacecraft is attached to a descent probe.

114The spacecraft will do two flybys of Venus on the way there.

115During those flybys, the spacecraft is going to study Venus in ultraviolet light and also near-infrared light.

116These are colors of light that our eyes can't see, but they provide information about the clouds of Venus and also the surface of Venus.

117Two years after launch, we're going to drop a descent probe into Venus's atmosphere that will be released from the spacecraft.

118Our descent sphere is a titanium sphere.

119It's about the size of maybe a small beanbag chair or a large beach ball, so not enormous, but not super tiny either.

120The descent probe will take about an hour to fall through Venus's thick atmosphere.

121During its descent, it's going to make thousands of measurements of the atmospheric composition.

122And we really want to understand the composition of Venus's atmosphere better, because we want to look for information about what Venus might have been like in the past.

123The name Da Vinci is an acronym, and the N stands for noble gases.

124Studying the noble gases of Venus's atmosphere in particular will help give scientists a peek at the history of how Venus became what it is today.

125Noble gases are unreactive gases.

126Because they don't react with things, they kind of stick around and they could record a long history of processes that could have occurred on Venus.

127So from those and other gases, we want to learn things like the volcanic history of Venus, how Venus got its water, how much water Venus may have had, how it may have lost that water, etc, etc.

128All these interesting questions about Venus's origin and evolution.

129Da Vinci's descent probe will make a harrowing journey through Venus's thick, cloudy atmosphere, and down to the surface.

130It will be outfitted with state-of-the-art protective materials to keep it as safe as possible.

131But scientists don't have expectations that it will be able to survive the harsh conditions very long.

132Once we clear the bottom of the clouds, which will happen at about 38 kilometers in altitude, we'll actually be able to have a crystal clear view of the surface.

133Then we have a camera at the bottom of our descent sphere, and that camera is going to peer downward through a sapphire window.

134And it's going to look at the surface from above, get a bird's eye view of the terrain.

135Once it hits the surface, we don't know if it will survive.

136It is not required to survive.

137If it does, we might be able to collect a few more minutes of data, but that will be a bonus, and we're not expecting or planning for that at the moment.

138While Da Vinci will mostly focus on studying the atmosphere, the other Venus mission, VERITAS, will orbit the planet, taking data to study the surface and geology.

139Evidence suggests that long ago, Venus hosted large, shallow oceans with a stable climate for at least a couple billion years.

140Measuring features of both the atmosphere and the surface can tell scientists whether or not water used to be present on Venus, and how much it influenced its topography and climate.

141Scientists like Sue are excited to see how much Earth and Venus have in common, especially when it comes to questions of planet formation, geological activity, and the presence of water.

142VERITAS will investigate the global geologic evolution of Venus, and answer some of the key questions that we need to understand about geologic evolution to get at this question of how planets become habitable, how they lose their habitability.

143We have an orbiter, and it has really just two instruments, but those instruments take a variety of different data sets.

144Venus has this intense cloud layer.

145We chose our instruments to be able to see through that cloud layer.

146Veritas will stay above Venus's atmosphere, orbiting the planet and collecting important information from above.

147We have a radar, which gives us a global topographic map.

148So we're going to take radar data at one time and then come around about eight months later and take another radar image.

149And we can tell if those surfaces captured have deformed.

150And then the other thing that we're going to do for the very first time is provide global maps of rock type.

151Veritas is very much focused on acquiring the global data sets.

152And da Vinci is focused on atmospheric chemistry.

153And so they're kind of getting the vertical dimension, if you will, whereas we're getting the horizontal dimension.

154But these two data sets will be just incredibly complementary.

155Scientists are looking at Venus to answer questions about Earth's future.

156Venus is currently experiencing what planetary and climate scientists call a runaway greenhouse effect.

157This is when heat gets trapped within the atmosphere, without any means to cool the planet down.

158Earth's oceans are a key ingredient for cooling our planet down.

159So if Venus used to have oceans, what happened to them?

160And what can we learn about the future of our planet as it heats up from global climate change?

161So the Venus we see now is a puzzle piece.

162In the 2020s, we have the glimmers of what might have been.

163An oceanic world that lost its oceans.

164Perhaps after billions of years of oceanic, beautiful, habitable world environments, something went awry.

165Something changed it to be the world of today.

166Those things and those questions are important because they tell us what can go wrong.

167How climates and atmospheric climate systems change will be relevant to backcasting the climate history of Earth and forecasting the eventual climate history.

168What happens if the oceans of Earth were to super evaporate away?

169What would that look like?

170What would that do to our atmosphere?

171How would that evolve?

172Exploring and learning more about Venus doesn't just tell us more about the second planet from the Sun.

173It can also help us learn what Earth may be like far in the future.

174Or even what we might find on an exoplanet orbiting a star thousands of light years away.

175For planetary scientists, it's almost a once-in-a-lifetime chance to have a mission you propose be accepted to fly out of our atmosphere into space and then onto another world.

176For Sue, Jim, and Jada, the day they were given the green light for the projects they've poured so much work into is certainly one to remember.

177Well, I was standing in my kitchen.

178My cell phone coverage is not very good, so I learned to get really close to my, uh, my modem, my Wi-Fi signal.

179And the call was supposed to come in between 5 and 6 a.m.

180here on the West Coast.

181Of course I had woken up at 3 o'clock because I couldn't sleep.

182So, uh, you know, I had been, uh, doing a lot of pacing and, uh, contemplating.

183I had a big pot of coffee going.

184I was texting a few team members that I knew were also up.

185Just waiting for the news, hoping that, uh, this time our lucky number would come up.

186So we got a warning from NASA headquarters, the bosses that we work for.

187You may be getting a call about decisions from the head of all science at NASA is the associate administrator and the science mission directorate, Dr.

188Zurbuchen.

189And so we thought, okay, well, there's four brilliant missions.

190They're all perfectly wonderful and should be selected.

191I was sitting at home, my dog underfoot.

192My dog's name is Glenda.

193Sitting there, I told my wife, uh, I'm nervous.

194Told my kids.

195And they said, okay, we'll leave you alone, Dad.

196And so at 8.05, the phone rings and it's the big boss.

197Doctors are booking.

198He said, well, Jim, I have news for you.

199You're going to Venus.

200And like, I had a, oh, a huge sigh of relief.

201I thought it was bad news.

202So I heard about the selection for DaVinci the morning of the announcements that the NASA administrator made.

203And I was sworn to secrecy.

204So, you know, it was exciting, but it was also like sitting on pins and needles waiting for the announcement to be made to the whole world so that we could actually, you know, celebrate as a team.

205It's pretty wild to think about the fact that I've got this mission to be made to work on.

206And it's going to be something that I'm going to be working on for about the next decade.

207So it's, it's a little bit scary, but it's also exciting to think about that.

208I haven't worked on a spaceflight mission before.

209So it's hard to know for me as someone who's new to this, what my job is going to look like and how it's going to evolve as the mission continues to evolve and mature as the years go by.

210But it will be exciting to find out what that looks like.

211Sending these missions to Venus isn't just exciting for the DaVinci and Veritas teams, but for scientists across the world who will be able to learn and discover new exciting things about our solar system with brand new data.

212Veritas is a dream come true for me and for a hundred other people, perhaps hundreds of other people that have helped make it come to fruition over the last decade.

213We have our current team that has worked super hard in the last four years, but there have been people on teams in the earlier versions that also made huge contributions.

214And we have international partners.

215You know, we're, we're not doing this alone.

216We're going with the Italian space agency, the German space agency, the French space agency.

217It's an international endeavor.

218And there have just been so many people who have worked literally night and day to make this happen.

219So we're going to bring the best of the tools that women and men on Earth have perfected over the last 40 years to fly by Venus and then take the plunge into our atmosphere to read her record books, which are mystical, unknown, tantalizing, but incomplete.

220We're going to complete them.

221So all the young women and men are interested in Venus will have a foundation, a legacy, so they can build the next models, the next questions, the next hypotheses, and they will be cool.

222Trust me.

223This is NASA's Curious Universe.

224This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana and Kate Steiner.

225Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.

226The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold and Michaela Sosby, with support from Emma Edmond and Priya Mittal.

227Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of System Sounds.

228Special thanks to Nancy Neal Jones, Ian O'Neill, and the Planetary Communications team.

229If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing NASA's Curious Universe with a friend.

230Learn more about Venus and our upcoming missions by visiting solarsystem.nasa.gov.

231Still curious about NASA?

232You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers.

233You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-CuriousUniverse at mail.nasa.gov.

234Go to nasa.gov slash curious universe for more information.

235And it's also a beautiful planet.

236Some of the photographs we have of Venus from above with the clouds.

237It almost looks like an artist painted brush strokes across Venus's surface.

238I've seen photographs of the unknown UV absorber.

239It's got these dark markings, and it's like somebody dipped their paintbrush in dark paint and just brushed it across Venus.

240So it's a really beautiful, beautiful planet.