Now, two new missions have been selected to explore the deadly atmosphere, crushing pressures and volcanic landscape. It’s been 30 years since Nasa last visited Venus, with the Magellan orbiter in 1990. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Louise Prockter of the Lunar and Planetary Institute/Universities Space Research Association in Houston is the principal investigator, while the project would be managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.By Dr Ashley Spindler, STFC Innovation Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. Trident would make a single fly-by of the moon to map it, determine what active geologic processes are in play and figure out if it has a subsurface ocean. Its ionosphere creates organic snow and the moon may have an interior ocean. Voyager 2 made a pass by the moon in 1989 showing it has active resurfacing with a thin atmosphere and volcanic activity. Trident is the probe with the farthest proposed destination, Neptune’s icy moon Triton. The principal investigator is Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson, while the mission would be managed from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The probe would use flybys to analyze the moon’s magma activity with a goal of further understanding the formation of terrestial bodies such as Earth. It’s the closest of Jupiter’s large moons to the gas giant, slightly larger than Earth’s moon, and not much is known about it. IVO, which stands for Io Volcano Observer, would head to Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The mission would be run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition, the probe would map the planet’s geology using infrared technology.

The proposed orbiter would chart surface elevations across most of the planet to form 3-D topographical maps while seeing if plate tectonics and volcanoes are still active. VERITAS, which stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy, also proposes to head to Earth’s next-door neighbor with a goal of mapping the surface of Venus, determine the planet’s geologic history and determine why it formed in a different manner than Earth. The mission looks to understand better terrestrial planet formation and would be led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It would be the first U.S.-led Venus-specific mission since 1978. The measurement tools would be protected from the planet’s harsh environment and the probe would also have cameras while an orbiter would remain above the planet to map the geological makeup of the surface. The planet-bound hardware would be designed to move through the planet’s atmosphere and down to the surface. DAVINCI+, which stands for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gasses, Chemistry and Imaging Plus), is focused on how the atmosphere of the second planet closest to the sun formed, but also determine whether or not Venus ever had an ocean.

Neptunes missions