Nasa makes plans to return to Venus to probe the hellish chemistry of its atmosphere

Despite Earth and Venus being a similar size and distance from the sun, only one has oceans that team with life, while the other is utterly inhospitable – shrouded by clouds of sulfuric acid with a surface hot enough to melt lead. To understand why the two planets are so different, and whether Venus was ever habitable, Nasa plans to send a suite of modern chemistry instruments aboard a probe in 2029. This will be the first such mission to enter Venus’s atmosphere in more than four decades.

Venus’s atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and its atmospheric pressure is more than 90 times that of Earth’s. In spite of this unpromising environment, researchers have hypothesised that Venus may once have supported life. Scientists leading the Davinci (deep atmosphere Venus investigation of noble gases, chemistry and imaging) mission hope the mass spectrometry equipment that will be tucked away inside its titanium sphere will reveal Venus’s mysterious past by analysing its atmosphere.