The Rediscovery of Venus
In the last few decades, exploration of the second innermost planet in the solar system has been rather sluggish. But now the USA and Europe want to send three space probes to our inhospitable neighboring world.
Suzanne Smrekar has been studying Venus for decades. The NASA geophysicist already worked on the Venus orbiter Magellan, which was launched in 1989. It was equipped with a radar system that could see beneath the planet's thick clouds and, for the first time, map the entire surface - a bizarre world with few craters, an abundance of volcanoes and vast plains of solidified lava. The data provided evidence for one of the most important unanswered questions in planetary research to this day: what caused Venus to be in such an infernal state? The second innermost planet in the solar system is almost a twin of neighboring Earth in terms of size and composition. Why do the two sibling planets have such amazingly different histories?
Magellan's exploration ended in 1994. His mission was NASA's last to explore Venus. Just as Smrekar and her colleagues grappled with the planet's newly uncovered mysteries, sensational claims about life on Mars captured public attention. A quarter of a century later, much of the global planetary science community is still engaged in the hitherto unsuccessful search for Martians. Meanwhile, Venus-an acidic, intensely hot, dry, and probably lifeless wasteland-long lived in the shadows.
A turning point came in June 2021 when NASA announced a selection of new interplanetary missions as part of its Discovery program…
