NASA's DAVINCI mission to unravel mysteries of Earth’s sister planet: All you need to know

NASA's Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission is scheduled to lift off in 2029. The mission aims to explore Earth's sister planet, Venus, to determine if it was habitable and understand how it became an inferno-like world.

This will be the first US probe mission to enter Venus' atmosphere in over 40 years. DAVINCI will measure the composition of Venus' atmosphere and return spectacular high-resolution pictures of the unique geological features of Earth's nearest planetary neighbour for the first time.

Aiming to launch in 2029, DAVINCI will taste and smell Venus’ atmosphere and return the first high-resolution images of its unique geological features. Learn how the mission may unravel Venus mysteries in our “Small Steps, Giant Leaps” podcast episode: https://t.co/v0HPfMJFak pic.twitter.com/fqYfbbDc6i

— NASA (@NASA) January 30, 2022

The mission will consist of a spacecraft that will track motions of the clouds and map surface composition by measuring heat emission from Venus' surface that escapes to space through the massive atmosphere and a probe that will descend through the atmosphere, sampling its chemistry as well as the temperature, pressure, and winds.

The DAVINCI probe will host the following instruments:

• Venus Mass Spectrometer (VMS) - to measure Venus' noble gases such as helium, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon
• Venus Tunable Laser Spectrometer (VTLS) - to measure water and oxygen and sulfur and phosphine
• Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation (VASI) - to study pressure and temperatures and the wind structure
• Venus Descent Imager (VenDI) - to capture images below the clouds all the way down to the surface.

The mission payload will carry two additional instruments:

• Compact Ultraviolet to Visible Imaging Spectrometer (CUVIS) - to study the clouds and chemistry of the Venus upper atmosphere from above
• Venus Oxygen Fugacity (VfOx) - a student collaboration experiment to measure the partial pressure of oxygen in the deep atmosphere directly

All of the critical data captured by these instruments will get beamed up to the Carrier Relay Imaging Spacecraft (CRIS), which will then beam that data back to Earth.