NASA Will Head To Venus For First Time In Roughly 30 Years

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 The pair beat out two other finalists, which would have sent probes to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io or Neptune’s moon Triton—destinations that have been high on planetary science wish lists for decades.

Jupiter's moon Io.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft recorded this view of Jupiter’s moon Io, and one of its erupting volcanoes, during an encounter with Jupiter in 2007 on the way to Pluto.Photograph by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Goddard Space Flight Center

The announcement comes amid surging interest in a U.S.-led mission to Venus, which some planetary scientists have considered “the forgotten planet.” Venus is remarkably similar to Earth in size and mass. And although it is a hellish, inhospitable world today, it may once have been a temperate, ocean-covered planet like our own. Understanding how Venus became such an extremely unfriendly world is crucial for understanding how common truly Earth-like planets might be.

“We have an Earth-size planet next door that is nothing like Earth—why? That’s a pretty important thing to figure out,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University. “We have some pretty big questions to answer regarding the formation, characteristics, and evolution of an Earth-size world.”

Double the fun

NASA’s Discovery program supports smaller, less expensive missions than those in its New Frontiers and flagship categories. Launching roughly every 36 months, Discovery missions are typically capped at $450 million, excluding launch vehicle and mission operations costs, while New Frontiers expeditions are capped at $850 million. Flagships—such as the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers—can cost billions. 

Currently, NASA is flying two Discovery missions. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2009, has spent more than a decade mapping the moon’s surface. The InSight Lander, launched in 2018, is studying the Martian interior.

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