ISRO Mission To Venus:
After sending missions to the Moon and Mars, the ISRO is now readying a spacecraft to orbit Venus to study what lies below the surface of the solar system’s hottest planet, and also unravel the mysteries under the Sulfuric Acid clouds enveloping it.
- ISRO is planning to launch the mission in December 2024.
- Venus is the second planet from the sun and the hottest planet in the solar system with a surface temperature of 500C – high enough to melt lead.
- The planet’s thick atmosphere has cranked the surface pressure up to 90 bars.
- A single Venusian rotation takes 243.0226 Earth days.
- That means a day lasts longer than a year on Venus, which makes a complete orbit around the sun in 225 Earth days.
- The Venusian planetary core has a diameter of about 4,360 miles (7,000 km), comparable to Earth’s core.
- Venus is one of just two planets that rotate from east to west. Only Venus and Uranus have this “backwards” rotation.
- Missions to Venus:
- Magellan – a Nasa mission that ended in 1994.
- Venus Express– A European mission- focused on atmospheric science.
- Akatsuki– Japanese spacecraft- focused on atmospheric science.
- NASA’s new missions to Venus:
- Davinci+:
- The Davinci+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) mission will:
- Measure the planet’s atmosphere to gain insight into how it formed and evolved.
- Determine whether Venus ever had an ocean.
- Return the first high resolution images of the planet’s “tesserae” geological features (These features could be comparable to continents on Earth).
- Veritas (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy):
- This mission will map the planet’s surface to understand its geological history and investigate how it developed so differently than Earth.
- It will use a form of radar to chart surface elevations and discover whether volcanoes and earthquakes are still happening.
- Davinci+:
