That, in turn, could indicate whether Venus ever had large amounts of liquid water such as an ocean. That's because of the thick atmosphere and the greenhouse effects that it creates, he says.ĮnVision will use three different spectrometers to analyze minerals on the surface and trace gases from both the surface and from Venus’ atmosphere. But as you descend through the clouds, then it just gets hotter and hotter, says Wilson. That’s because it’s completely enveloped in very reflective clouds, which reflect away 70 percent of the light which falls on it, he says.

On geological timescales, most of Venus’ surface is less than a billion years old which is thought to be due to some sort of catastrophic volcanic resurfacing mechanism.Įven though its closer orbit to the Sun gives it twice as much sunlight, Venus today absorbs less sunlight than Earth, says Wilson. “Everything is extrapolated from what we see currently.” “Looking at Venus in the past and figuring out how it got to where it is now is difficult,” Colin Wilson, a planetary scientist at ESA ESTEC in The Netherlands, told me at last month’s Europlanet Science Congress in Granada, Spain.

No one is suggesting that Earth would ever turn into as inhospitable planet as Venus, but a better understanding of the mechanisms that led to Venus’ runaway greenhouse might help us understand to how to best mitigate climate change on Earth. It’s important to understand when and how Venus reached its climatic tipping point into a runaway greenhouse, as Anne Grete Straume, EnVision’s project scientist, told me at last month’s Europlanet Science Congress in Granada, Spain. It also could help us better understand climate change here on Earth. But understanding Venus is crucial to understanding terrestrial planets everywhere, from our own Earth to those in orbit around distant sunlike stars. There’s also still much debate as to whether Venus ever had any sort of atmospheric processing that enabled the planet to sequester its carbon dioxide in carbonate rocks, as does Earth. NASA / JAXA / ISAS / DARTS / Damia Bouic / VR2Planets The EnVision mission to Venus will explore why Earth's closest neighbour is so different.

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