Things are finally looking up for NASA's first missions to Venus in a generation

Most planetary scientists will tell you the heyday of Venus exploration was more than 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 Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI), is now scheduled for launch in December 2030, a year earlier than previously planned. DAVINCI will send a parachute-assisted descent probe through the atmosphere of Venus, returning the first direct images of the planet’s surface since 1982. A second mission, Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy (VERITAS), will follow with a launch in November 2032 to map the Venusian surface by radar from orbit.

The European Space Agency is building another orbiter, Envision, for launch to Venus in 2032. The Venus armada might get started as soon as next year, when Rocket Lab aims to launch a privately funded probe to search for signs of organic material in the planet’s clouds.

That was the update last week at a meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG), a confab of scientists whose research interests focus on the scorching world just sunward from Earth. Europe’s Envision orbiter will also launch to Venus in 2032. The Venus armada might get started as soon as late 2027, when Rocket Lab aims to launch a privately funded probe to search for signs of organic material in the planet’s high-altitude clouds.

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

“We have some good news for Venus,” said Jim Garvin, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and principal investigator for DAVINCI.

Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft captured this image of cloud-covered Venus with its ultraviolet camera in 2018.

Credit: JAXA

Rewinding the clock

It wasn’t easy for Venus to find its moment. Mars has hogged the spotlight for decades and remains the long-term lodestar for human spaceflight. The enigma of comets and asteroids lured the world’s space agencies into funding a series of robotic probes to study them. The icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, some of which may hold the ingredients for life, are the latest hotspots for planetary exploration.

But Venus ventures closer to Earth than any other planet, making it the easiest world for a spacecraft to reach, if not land on. Venus is roughly the same size as Earth and may have once shared 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° Fahrenheit (467° Celsius).

There’s still plenty to learn about Venus. The planet is less well mapped than Mars, and scientists aren’t exactly sure what triggered Venus’ runaway greenhouse effect. It is notoriously difficult to land on Venus, where the air pressure is 93 times that of sea level on Earth, equivalent to about 3,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface.

NASA’s last mission to Venus was Magellan, which mapped the planet’s tortured surface with a radar instrument capable of peering through the atmosphere’s opaque acid clouds. Magellan launched in 1989 and ended its mission in 1994, revealing the broad strokes of Venus’ landscape for the first time, but with only 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 tuned to study the planet’s atmosphere. But it took 30 years for missions to improve on Magellan’s map to win support from decision-makers at NASA and the European Space Agency.

The fortunes of Venus scientists changed in a big way in June 2021, when NASA and ESA selected three Venus missions for development in a span of just eight days. “The Venus community is absolutely elated and excited and wants to just get to work and see this happen,” said Ellen Stofan, a Venus scientist and under secretary for Science and Research at the Smithsonian Institution, in an interview with Ars at the time.

It turned out the fight for Venus wasn’t over. Less than two years later, NASA officials considered canceling one of the two NASA-led missions, known as VERITAS, amid budget pressures in the agency’s planetary science division. The money problems largely stemmed from delays and cost overruns with the Psyche mission, NASA’s first spacecraft to explore the metal asteroid.

The VERITAS project stayed alive, but just barely. At the same time, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the institution in charge of Psyche, VERITAS, and a host of other science missions, struggled through layoffs and the cancellation of NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission, which was set to become the most expensive project in the lab’s history.

The goal of VERITAS is to build on the legacy of the Magellan mission. The VERITAS orbiter, carrying a much better radar than Magellan, will vastly improve the resolution of maps of Venus, with a particular focus on regions with active volcanoes.

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

NASA’s contribution to Envision was put in question by the Trump administration last year, and Ars reported in September that ESA was moving ahead with a European-built radar for Envision after NASA pulled out of the agreement. Nick Lang, a program scientist in NASA’s planetary science division, confirmed this at last week’s VEXAG meeting, citing limitations in NASA’s budget. “That decision was not an easy one,” Lang said.

A portion of the eastern edge of Alpha Regio is displayed in this three-dimensional perspective view of the surface of Venus. The topographic information comes from radar maps created using data from NASA’s Magellan orbiter in the 1990s. The simulated orange hues are based on color images from Soviet Venera landers.

Credit: NASA

Acceleration shock

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

Ending support for Europe’s Envision mission and canceling Mars Sample Return freed up enough funding for NASA to move forward with DAVINCI and VERITAS, and in some cases, buy back some of their past delays. DAVINCI is now targeting a launch in December 2030, a year earlier than the previous plan.

“Thanks to encouragement in early ’26 from our leaders at NASA Headquarters and the Planetary Science Division,” said Garvin, who leads the DAVINCI science team. “This is our new scenario for the most cost-effective and science-effective launch to Venus … What we’ve done now is accelerated launch by 54 weeks to a case where we have a very low delta-V trajectory that gets off the ground in late December 2030.”

Low delta-V is an important qualifier. This means the trajectory for DAVINCI will require relatively little energy, at least as far as interplanetary missions go. A flyby with Venus in early 2032 will set up DAVINCI to release its atmospheric entry probe for descent to the planet’s surface on October 3, 2032. The mission’s carrier spacecraft will continue zooming through the inner Solar System, and the revised trajectory should allow it to hold enough fuel in reserve to enter orbit around Venus when it comes back around again, something that wasn’t always assured, Garvin said.

The comeback of VERITAS is even more striking.

“VERITAS is now funded with a launch date of November 2032, so this is great news for us,” said Dan Nunes, the mission’s deputy project scientist at JPL. “We’re staffing up. We’re accelerating, not to the point of Jim’s acceleration [on DAVINCI], but we’re moving.”

VERITAS is targeted to launch the month after DAVINCI arrives at Venus. “It keeps building on momentum for Venus science, which is great,” Nunes said. “We’re going to arrive at Venus close to the middle of 2033, and we’re going to have a phase of aerobraking” before beginning routine science observations.

In recent months, engineers working on the DAVINCI mission completed experiments showing how the Venus probe’s cameras and instruments will capture data during its one-shot descent through the atmosphere. It will take about an hour for DAVINCI’s battery-powered titanium descent craft to travel from space to the surface of Venus, and all of its imagery and data must be relayed to Earth through a radio link with DAVINCI’s carrier spacecraft before it goes over the horizon.

“We have to optimize everything in the final eight to 10 minutes of descent as we come into the supercritical atmosphere to get this data back for all of us to work with,” Garvin said.

The DAVINCI team also recently subjected a prototype of the entry probe to the extreme temperatures it will see at Venus. The insulated sphere kept its internal components below 86° Fahrenheit (30° Celsius), meeting requirements. DAVINCI’s managers at Goddard reported results from these two tests to NASA Headquarters and Administrator Jared Isaacman, and to the White House, Garvin said.

The news is similarly positive for VERITAS, according to Nunes, who credited scientific advocacy groups for the mission’s survival.

“VERITAS is going,” Nunes said. “We would like to thank all the support from the community, from VEXAG, the Planetary Society, all those people that went out there and made the case for Venus exploration for keeping VERITAS alive and getting us a launch date, so we’re very thankful for that.”

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