(music throughout) Venus ... a lost frontier…
Humanity hasn’t visited the atmosphere of Earth’s sister planet in over 40 years.
DAVINCI is ready to take us back to Venus.
Its massive atmosphere holds the clues to how our neighboring planet went from an ocean world
to the runaway greenhouse that it is today.
DAVINCI carries a descent probe designed to study Venus' atmosphere from within and
from top to bottom, as well as a descent camera
that will capture images of the enigmatic mountains of Alpha Regio.
In this massive atmosphere is a chemical laboratory just waiting to be discovered...
The spherical probe protects a suite of state-of-the-art instruments from the extreme temperatures, high pressures, and acidic clouds.
The probe will sniff the atmosphere throughout its descent, and the analytical instruments will
work together to definitively measure the composition of Venus’ atmosphere.
The camera peers down through a small viewing port,
and once the probe passes below the cloud deck, it will start to collect a series of three-dimensional views
that will also help us understand whether the rocks of Alpha Regio
reveal a story of an ancient continent shaped by water.
The DAVINCI probe will take the first ever close-up images
of rugged mountains on Venus that may preserve an earlier time.
These discoveries will be woven together to help the science community
answer big questions about Venus’ past oceans,
the possibility of ongoing volcanic activity,
and why Venus is so different from Earth…
This incredible scientific data will be sent back to Earth by communication with the DAVINCI relay spacecraft above.
And the science community will interpret these results for years to come,
to understand better how habitability evolved on Venus,
how climate change may play out on our home planet,
and how best to search for habitable planets among the billions of exoplanets throughout the Universe.