Venus is the world next door. An Earth-sized planet that couldn’t be less like Earth, it is a hellish world with acid clouds. Several missions are planning to go there over the next decade, including NASA’s DAVINCI, which will drop a probe into the atmosphere. The goal will be to study the atmosphere and the land below, and NASA has an interesting location to target: what is believed to be an ancient continent.
DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) will fly down to Alpha Regio, which is one of the most mysterious regions on Venus. It has a terrain that has not been seen anywhere else in the Solar System. Known as “tesserae” due to the resemblance to a mosaic, the location will provide some of the answers the mission hopes to deliver, such as the ancient history of Venus.
The mission team wanted to have the best understanding of where they are going, so they used data from NASA’s Magellan. Combined with observations from Arecibo and new data analysis techniques, they delivered the current best map of Alpha Regio.
The original (right) and updated (left) maps of Alpha Regio. The red ellipses on each image mark the area DAVINCI’s probe will descend over.
Image Credit: Jim Garvin/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
The next best one will be done by DAVINCI itself. Once the probe passes through the thick layer of clouds, it will be snapping photos of Alpha Regio from 40 kilometers (25 miles) of altitude as it moves downward, facing the increasing temperatures (enough to melt lead) and crushing pressure.
The team is also practicing software to see the terrain across the haze, developing techniques that can deliver the level of detail they hope to obtain. The goal is to have a map with a resolution of about 1 meter (3 feet) per pixel, showing individual rocks, possible ancient rivers, and more.
“All this old mission data is part of a mosaic that tells the story of Venus,” Jim Garvin, DAVINCI principal investigator and chief scientist at NASA Goddard, said in a statement. “A story that is a masterpiece in the making but incomplete.”
The detailed map will allow planetary scientists to understand how the tesserae came to be. Do they form like Earth’s mountains or volcanos? Venus has over 85,000 volcanos – an enormous number compared to the 1,500 active on Earth.
DAVINCI is made of an atmospheric probe and an orbiter. The mission will inform our understanding of the dense and toxic Venusian atmosphere as well as provide new insights into the possible watery past of the planet. Did Venus ever have an ocean? DAVINCI will bring the first photo of the surface of Venus since the Soviet Venera 14 in 1982.
