NASA has announced two missions to Venus to examine the planet’s atmosphere and geological features.

 NASA has announced two missions to Venus to examine the planet’s atmosphere and geological features. The last US spacecraft to visit the planet was the Magellan orbiter in 1990. Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said the missions would offer the “chance to investigate a planet we haven’t been to in more than 30 years”.

“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world, capable of melting lead at the surface,” Bill Nelson said on Wednesday.

The first mission the Davinci+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Nobel gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) will be going to measure venus’s atmosphere to gain information about how it formed and evolved. And also going to research whether Venus had an ocean. 

The second mission Veritas (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) will map the planet’s surface and its geological history and investigate how it developed so differently than earth.

“It is astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in the sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,” said Tom Wagner.