Venus Will Have a Fleet of Spacecraft as Europe Adds Orbiter Mission
The New York Times
The EnVision spacecraft will complement two NASA missions announced last week, ending the relative loneliness of a planet sometimes thought of as Earth’s twin.
Last week, NASA stunned planetary scientists when it announced that it was going to send not one but two different spacecraft to Venus by the end of the decade. On Thursday, the European Space Agency declared that it was launching its own mission there too: EnVision, an orbiter that would investigate even more of the planet’s mysteries. Until this month, Venus had been somewhat lonely. NASA’s last mission to the second planet was Magellan, which burned up in its skies in 1994. Europe’s last foray there was the Venus Express spacecraft, which orbited the planet and studied it from 2006 until 2014. Today, Japan’s climate-observing Akatsuki is the only emissary from Earth in orbit. With Europe’s EnVision spacecraft added to NASA’s decision to revisit Venus with the VERITAS and DAVINCI+ missions, it’s safe to say that the next decade will belong to Venus, and some in the Venusian science community have been rendered speechless.More Related News