NASA has set a tentative launch date for June 2029 for its DAVINCI mission to Venus, with a probe expected to descend into the planet’s atmosphere and surface in mid-2031.
Scientists and engineers provided new details about the mission in a recent article in The Planetary Science Journal.
The DAVINCI or Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gas, Chemistry and Imaging mission, named after the famous artist Leonardo da Vinci, is the first to study Venus using spacecraft flyovers and a descent probe, according to NASA.
The agency announced the mission in June 2021 along with VERITAS, which will map the planet’s surface from orbit to help determine its geological history.
The mission will measure Venus’ atmosphere-climate system for the first time and will include the first image of the planet’s mountainous land descent, according to NASA.
Jim Garvin, lead author of the research paper and DAVINCI principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the measurements would allow them to detect special types of rock on the surface and look for signs of erosion.
“No previous mission to the atmosphere of Venus has measured the chemistry or the environment with the detail that the DAVINCI spacecraft can do,” Garvin said in a NASA statement.
The first flyby of Venus will be six and a half months after launch, according to NASA, and it will take two years for the spacecraft to position itself to enter the planet’s atmosphere over the Alpha Regio region.
The descent of the probe to the surface of Venus is expected to last an hour, during which it will acquire hundreds of images once it emerges from the clouds at approximately 100,000 feet or 30,500 meters above the local surface.
With Reuters files