New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades

One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet’s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes.

NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too. On Wednesday, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, announced the agency’s latest choices for robotic planetary missions, both expected to head to Venus in the late 2020s: DAVINCI+ and VERITAS. “These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” Mr. Nelson said during his “State of NASA” address to the space agency’s work force.