New NASA missions aim to find traces of life on Venus and some satellites of the giant planets of the solar system, the portal newscientist.com says. As part of the Discovery Agency program, which funds relatively inexpensive missions in our solar system, four new missions were selected that aim to visit the least explored worlds in the solar system. Two of the four missions aim to explore the second planet from the sun – Venus – the most poorly studied world of the inner solar system.

Venus is one of the most poorly studied objects in the solar system.

Is there life on Venus?

Several new NASA missions to explore Venus propose to examine the surface of the second planet from the sun. The first mission, called the DAVINCI + program (Deep Atmosphere Venus Examination of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging Plus), involves sending a new generation of spacecraft close to the planet. This device, which quickly falls through the planet's hot and dense atmosphere, could measure the composition of the planet's air envelope and give researchers the opportunity to understand the processes that make up the Venusian atmosphere. Among other things, mankind can finally have a unique opportunity to find the answer to the question of whether oceans and seas have ever existed in Venus' history, and to create conditions for the appearance of life on the planet.

See also: There is increasing evidence that Venus was once inhabited

The second mission, which scientists call the VERITAS program, will be in orbit around the planet. The device revolves around the planet and will be equipped with powerful radar devices that enable the mechanism to “look” through the dense atmosphere of Venus and map the surface in search of active processes such as volcanism or plate tectonics. The device can also determine the composition of the surface and tell us why it is so different from the earth.

NASA's new missions will help determine whether conditions existed on Venus

Two other alleged missions are aimed at examining the surface details of perhaps the strangest satellites in our solar system. The Io Volcanic Observer (IVO) is the first proposed vehicle to lead several narrow passages past the Jupiter satellite Io, the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Although we know that Io is almost completely covered by massive volcanoes, a new space mission is helping us to find out where the magma that these volcanoes come from and how they erupt.

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The final mission, called the TRIDENT mission, will be the implementation of a proposal from NASA experts to fly past Neptune and its giant satellite Triton, which is distinguished by its strange activity from other frozen bodies in the solar system. The distant satellite thus has its own ice volcanoes that actively erupt in ice and water, although both Neptune and Triton are extremely far from the sun. The TRIDENT program will search for the subterranean ocean on the unusual moon of Neptune, among other things, to find out the reasons for the unexpected activity of this ice object and to give mankind more and more knowledge about the development and development of potentially inhabited worlds.

All of the missions described above will be funded with $ 3 million over the next nine months. At the end of the development period, one or two of them are selected for the actual start.