ESA is readying its EnVision spacecraft to investigate Venus' past; know all about it

The European Space Agency (ESA) is building a new mission to explore Earth's neighbour Venus and how it turned into a hellish planet. Named EnVision, the mission involves launching a spacecraft to Venus in the early 2030s to investigate the planet’s inner core up to its atmosphere and gain further insights into its evolution. 

Scientists say that Venus is the most Earth-like in terms of size, composition and distance from the sun and once had a climate similar to our planet billions of years ago. However, existing theories suggest that the planet’s evolution took a different turn leaving it uninhabitable. 

Objectives of EnVision

According to ESA, the mission objectives include investigating and characterising Venus’ atmosphere, surface, subsurface and interior and providing a holistic view of the planet’s history, activity and climate. The reason for selecting Venus is because it acts as a natural laboratory for finding out how habitability or the lack of it evolved in our solar system. 

While investigating the planet, EnVision will also try to answer questions like how active Venus has been geologically and tectonically today and for the past billion years, if it ever had oceans and whether the Venusian rocks hold signs of it, and how and why the greenhouse effect on the planet began. 

Venus’ atmosphere is extremely heavy and toxic with clouds of sulphuric acid and the intense surface temperature, which reaches 477°C, does not allow water to exist in a liquid state. Besides, the atmospheric pressure on Venus is over 90 times that of the Earth at sea level.

Status of the EnVision mission

The engineers are currently testing the spacecraft components which will dive through the unforgiving Venusian atmosphere. ESA says that it is subjecting the components to see if they can survive the descent when the spacecraft is made to dive from an altitude of 2,50,000 km down to 130 km from the surface. The mission team would use a method called 'aerobraking' through which the spacecraft will be lowered slowly through repeated passes over a period of two years. 

Notably, NASA is also a contributor to EnVision as it will provide the Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument (VenSAR) and Deep Space Network support for critical mission phases.

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