Everything is finally being weighed up for NASA's first mission to Venus in a generation

"This is great news for us. We are adding staff.

Everything is finally lining up for NASA's first mission to Venus in a generation

"That's great news for us. We're ramping up. We're accelerating."

A test unit for a DAVINCI inlet probe is transported to a furnace at Rex Heat Treat in Bedford, Pennsylvania for thermal testing.

Most planetary scientists will tell you that the peak of Venus discovery was over a generation ago. That is about to change.

Two NASA missions are on track to launch to Venus in the early 2030s. The first, known as the Venus Deep Atmospheric Noble Gas, Chemistry and Imaging Survey (DAVINCI), is now scheduled for launch in December 2030, a year earlier than previously planned. Da Vinci will send a parachute-assisted lander through Venus' atmosphere and obtain the first direct images of the planet's surface since 1982. A second mission, Venus Emissions, Radiosciences, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS), will launch in November 2032 and will be followed by radar from the surface of Venus.

The European Space Agency is building another orbiter, Envision, to launch to Venus in 2032. Venus may begin next year, when Rocket Lab plans to launch a privately funded probe to look for signs of organic matter in the planet's clouds.

The update came last week at a meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG), a group of scientists whose research interests focus on the burning world that is directly from Earth toward the Sun. The European Envision orbiter will also launch to Venus in 2032. The Venus fleet may begin as late as 2027, when Rocket Lab plans to launch a privately funded probe to search for signs of organic matter in the planet's high clouds.

None of this was guaranteed. Budget cuts jeopardized one US mission to Venus and delayed another, then forced NASA to pull out of a partnership with Europe to supply a key part for Envision. But scientists struck an optimistic tone at last week's VEXAG meeting.

"We have good news for Venus," said Jim Garvin, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and da Vinci principal investigator.

It was not easy for Zehra to find her moment. Mars has been in the spotlight for decades and is the long-term star of human spaceflight. The mystery of comets and asteroids has led the world's space agencies to invest in a series of robotic probes to study them. The icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, some of which may harbor the ingredients for life, are the latest hotspots for planetary exploration.

But Venus comes closer to Earth than any other planet, and is the easiest world to reach if a spacecraft doesn't land. Venus is about the size of Earth and may once have had a similar climate, but something happened to turn it into an inhospitable world with an atmosphere made of nearly pure carbon dioxide, clouds of toxic sulfuric acid, and temperatures hot enough to melt lead, about 872 degrees Fahrenheit (467 degrees Celsius).

There is still much to learn about Venus. The planet is less well mapped than Mars, and scientists aren't exactly sure what causes Venus' runaway greenhouse effect. Landing on Venus is extremely difficult, where the air pressure is 93 times that of sea level on Earth, which is equivalent to about 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

NASA's last mission to Venus was Magellan, which mapped the planet's tortured surface with a radar instrument capable of peering through the opaque acid clouds of Earth's atmosphere. Magellan launched in 1989 and ended its mission in 1994, revealing the broad contours of Venus' landscape for the first time, but only with enough resolution to resolve features the size of a football field or larger.

That left a lot to be desired. Japan and Europe launched orbiters to Venus in 2005 and 2010 with instruments set up to study the planet's atmosphere. But it took 30 years for the missions to improve Magellan's map to gain the support of decision makers at NASA and the European Space Agency.

In June 2021, the fortunes of Venus scientists changed dramatically when NASA and ESA selected three Venus missions to develop over an eight-day period. "The Venus community is absolutely delighted and excited and just wants to go to work and see this happen," Ellen Stofan, a Venus scientist and assistant secretary for science and research at the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview with Ars at the time.

Turns out the fight for Venus wasn't over. Less than two years later, NASA officials considered canceling one of the two NASA-led missions, VERITAS, amid budget pressures in the agency's planetary science division. The financial problems were mainly caused by delays and cost overruns on the Psyche mission, NASA's first spacecraft to discover a metallic asteroid.

Project VERITAS survived, but barely. At the same time, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the agency responsible for RAN, VERITAS, and a host of other science missions, grappled with layoffs and the cancellation of NASA's Mars Sample Return Mission, which was to become the most expensive project in the lab's history.

VERITAS aims to build on the legacy of the Magellan mission. The VERITAS orbiter, which has a much better radar than Magellan, greatly improves the resolution of Venus maps, with a special focus on areas with active volcanoes.

At the same time, NASA slowed development of VERITAS and committed to providing a radar instrument to the European Space Agency for the Envision mission, an orbiter with the same objectives as VERITAS.

NASA's help with Envision was called into question by the Trump administration last year, and Ars reported in September that ESA was moving forward with a European-made radar for Envision after NASA pulled out of the deal. Nick Long, a program scientist in NASA's Planetary Science Division, confirmed this at last week's VEXAG meeting. NASA's budget constraints "This was not an easy decision," Long said.

NASA's planetary science budget remains under pressure. The Trump administration has twice proposed deep cuts to planetary science. Congress restored most of the 2026 budget and is expected to do the same in the 2027 budget.

Ending support for Europe's Envision mission and canceling the Mars sample return freed up enough funding for NASA to move forward with DAVINCI and VERITAS and, in some cases, redeem some of their past delays. DaVinci now plans to launch in December 2030, a year earlier than previously planned.

Garvin, who leads the DAVINCI science team, said: "Thanks to the encouragement from our leaders at NASA Headquarters and the Planetary Science Division in early '26. This is our new scenario for the most cost-effective and most scientific launch to Venus... What we've done now is accelerate the launch by 54 weeks to have a very low delta-V trajectory that leaves Earth in late December 2030."

Low Delta-V is an important qualifier. This means that DAVINCI's trajectory requires relatively little energy, at least as far as interplanetary missions go. A Venus flyby in early 2032 will launch DaVinci to release its atmospheric entry probe to land on the planet's surface on October 3, 2032. The mission's spacecraft will continue zooming through the solar system, and the revised trajectory should allow it to retain enough fuel. Garvin said it's in reserve to enter orbit around Venus when it returns, something it hasn't always been certain about.

The return of VERITAS is even more impressive.

"VERITAS is now secured with a November 2032 launch date, so that's good news for us," said Dan Nunes, deputy mission project scientist at JPL. We are replenishing the force. "We're accelerating, not as fast as Jim [at DAVINCI], but we're moving."

VERITAS is scheduled to launch to Venus a month after DAVINCI arrives. "This momentum continues for Venus science, which is great," Nunes said. "We will arrive at Venus around mid-2033 and have an airbrake phase before normal science observations begin."

In recent months, engineers working on the DaVinci mission have conducted experiments showing how the Venus probe's cameras and instruments will record data during its one-shot descent into the atmosphere. It takes about an hour for the titanium da Vinci spacecraft to travel from space to the surface of Venus, and all of its images and data must be transmitted to Earth via a radio link with the da Vinci carrier spacecraft before heading over the horizon.

"We have to optimize everything in the last 8 to 10 minutes of landing, as we go into supercritical space, to get this data back for all of us to work with," Garvin said.

The DAVINCI team also recently tested the prototype entry probe for the intense vapor it will see on Venus. The insulated sphere keeps its internal components below 86°F (30°C) and meets the requirements. According to Garvin, DaVinci managers at Goddard reported the results of the two tests to NASA headquarters and Administrator Jared Isaacman and to the White House.

The news is also positive for VERITAS, according to Nunes, who credits science advocacy groups for the mission's survival.

"VERITAS is leaving," Nunes said. "We want to thank all the support from the community, from VEXAG, the Planetary Society, all the people who went out there and worked hard to keep VERITAS alive and to get us a launch date to explore Venus, so we're very grateful for that."

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering the world's private space companies and space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, politics and business on and off the planet.