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NASA Plans To Explore Venus, Io, or Triton

2 March 20

We are about to learn a whole lot more about the Solar System, thanks to NASA. The space agency just awarded four teams with $3 million each to develop their mission plans to explore the astronomical world. Two teams are focused on Venus, one is focused on Jupiter’s highly volcanic moon Io, and the last – on Triton, a moon of Neptune.

“These selected missions have the potential to transform our understanding of some of the solar system’s most active and complex worlds,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a press release. “Exploring any one of these celestial bodies will help unlock the secrets of how it, and others like it, came to be in the cosmos.”

The four teams are going to use the $3 million that they were given to develop mission plans and sometime next year, a final decision will be made on which of the teams will be fully funded no more than $450 million. Up to two of the four teams will be fully funded.

The four projects currently selected are:

VERITAS – Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy. It would focus on exploring why Venus developed so differently from Earth.

DAVINCI+ – Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus. It would focus on the gases surrounding Venus, rather than the planet itself. The goal would be to learn if Venus ever had an ocean and learn how the planet’s atmosphere has evolved.

IVO – The Io Volcano Observer. It’s mission would be to visit Io, the highly volcanic moon of Jupiter, and learn more about it’s structure.

Trident – the only project with a name that does not stand for anything. Their goal would be to visit one of Neptune’s moons, Triton, and learn more about its surface as well as whether or not the moon has a predicted subsurface ocean.

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