NASA's chief scientist talks Venus weekend viewing event and future DAVINCI mission

The future of Venus exploration is nearly upon us with NASA's upcoming DAVINCI mission. This weekend is a great time to go outside and enjoy the views of our nearest planetary neighbor as Venus will be at its highest point in the night sky, giving us dazzling views of our sister planet. It's a fascinating and strange world - similar in size and terrain to Earth - but also vastly different.

WAMC Producer Jody Cowan spoke with NASA's chief scientist and Principal Investigator for the planned 2029 DAVINCI mission to Venus, Dr. Jim Garvin, about this new exciting era of planetary exploration.

Venus does its dance around the sun and we see it wandering through the sky. But on June 4th Venus will be at Zenith, as high as it gets in the night sky not the morning sky the night, and it will have the largest solar phase angle, it's over 50% of the disk of Venus will be visible. If you use binoculars, you'll see this beautiful half lit Venus, which is a gorgeous thing to see in a very dark time of night. Venus has this massive atmosphere. This ocean of air that reflects the light of the sun and lights it up like a shining balloon. And we can see her because she's very visible and bright. Other planets in the solar system are dimmer like Mars, and even like our own Earth. So, Venus’ big carbon dioxide atmosphere, and her gigantic cloud deck, make her just brilliant. Which then allows us to see her so well at this time of the night sky.

What is your background, and what is it that you do for NASA now?

So, I've been at NASA forever. It's the only place I've ever really worked. So, going into year 39 coming up. And I came to NASA to do things like missions to places like Venus and Mars, to use the great tools and minds of the NASA workforce, the women and men that do all the engineering makes everything possible, but bring it into the science domain. And so, I was trained to do that in graduate school and as an undergraduate, and I came to NASA with the idea of being a catalyst for new science in new places and in new ways. I had worked on Venus in graduate school, and worked with missions that were led by both the United States and the Soviet Union back then in the 80s. And no one's been back since! And so, one of my dreams has been to working within NASA to bring the NASA team back to Venus in a way that will make her shine.

I understand part of your expertise is looking at the geometric properties of the sedimentary systems on Venus, can you tell us more about this mysterious planet?

So, Venus is a strange planet because she has this ocean of air on top of herself, literally. The surface of Venus is like being 900 meters deep in the ocean, and it's hard to imagine that the gas near the surfaces is only 10 or 11 times less dense than liquid water but it's a gas. And yet that rock scape surface, which has been visited, is an exciting place. About eight or 9% of the surface of Venus are these mountain systems. Strange looking ridges, and mountains and valleys, some rising 10s of 1000s of feet. And these could be ancient continents like the core continents of Earth or they could be something else, we don't know. And so, to get to know Venus we need to get beneath the clouds to bring instruments that measure chemistry, and measure environments, and see the surface the way we would see it using new tools. And today, we can use tools that people in Hollywood use to make great movies, we can use those techniques to see Venus in 3-D as if we were coming in landing in a helicopter. And we're going to use those methods with our camera system to see these mountains of Venus, as if we were coming in for a landing, and measure what they might be made up. Venus is a slow rotator, and she actually spins backwards relative to planets like Earth and Mars, which we're both familiar with 24-hour days, all that good stuff. And so, Venus’ day is longer than a year, which is kind of weird. So, you know, the sun rises in the West not the east. And so, these enigmas of Venus make her very tantalizing. Why is she like that? Why isn't she more like Earth as this big, rocky world with 450 million square kilometers of land? Why isn't she you know, more truly our sister? That's the question.

I had read a theory that Venus was possibly struck by something in its early years that may have knocked it from it's original axis. I know something that you had a focus of studying was impact craters on Earth, the Moon and Mars. Is this something that you're excited to explore on Venus as well?

Well, that's one great question. Very difficult to answer because the impact record observed in the 90s by NASA's Magellan mission didn't show any smoking gun for that kind of mega impact. Whereas with the giant basins on Mars, Hellas and Argyre, giant ones on the moon, we don't see that on Venus. Probably because her surface has been recovered. Re, if you will, resurfaced either by volcanism very likely, or by volcanism plus an oceanic period. So more likely, what we can learn is why Venus grew up differently than us on the basis of its atmospheric evolution, and what the clues of that atmosphere, sort of a fossil record in chemistry, can tell us about that world as we then go to the places that could be the oldest on the planet. And that's DAVINCI's job, is to bring 21st century tools to those problems while bearing in mind the kind of question you raised.

NASA's DAVINCI mission to Venus is scheduled for launch in June of 2029. What is the six-year plan leading up to that launch date?

So, launching missions to complex places with multiple flight systems that are like spacecraft elements is really complicated business. It looks great on Star Trek, and Star Wars, and other great shows. But the engineering mastery of doing that is, you know, it's a symphony of engineers building and testing and packaging, and all the environments on Venus that we have to protect against so we can bring really delicate instruments to explore. They all have to be synchronized in testing. So, we're going to be really busy through waves of building, testing, packaging, encapsulating, and validating that they're going to work on Venus. They're going to work in the two-way communication systems between our mother spacecraft, which we call CRIS, and our descent spacecraft, which we hope to have a naming competition for, so we can make sure they talk together. And all those things take time. And to do them right, within a fixed budget, which is our job with the Discovery Program, is a big deal. And we're doing that, we have an amazing team of women and men to do that. And we can't wait for basically six years from now, when we're saying, "We're off to Venus".

What does your role entail as principal investigator for the mission?

So, as the principal investigator, you know, the buck stops here. In these competed missions, the PI person, woman or man, team, whatever, is the person that has to worry about delivering the product to the taxpayer, to NASA. We signed an agreement that we will deliver these things, at this level of success, for the American public, who expect us to do well. And so, my job is to do that across all the dimensions of the mission. We have a brilliant project manager, a project manager for resources, a project system engineering team, partners in industry who are absolutely world class at Lockheed Martin and other places. But my job is to make sure it all comes together. I'm lucky to have two deputy PIs who are world class, and work with me on that, and a project manager and all that. But my day to day is making sure we get it right and deliver the science for the money on time. And that's tough to do. And NASA has done pretty well on that, but it's sometimes, you know, takes more time and work than we expect, and we're not going to let that happen with DAVINCI. We're going to do our job and launch this mission as we've promised, and deliver this goldmine of new information for the girls and boys, and young women and men, so they can put things into perspective not just here in our solar system, but beyond.

I would imagine getting to any planet is difficult, but Venus is especially hard given its extreme temperatures and pressure. How do you build something that can survive the trip to a place like this and relayed information back?

Well, exactly. And so, we have really three flight system elements. We have a big carrying spacecraft that has a large radio communication antenna, six and a half feet wide, that allow us to talk to our descent probe as we go through the atmosphere, kind of like a diving bell, like a deep ocean submersible vehicle. Our vehicle protects against those environments from minus 50 at the top of the clouds, to 450 centigrade at the bottom, which is the temperature of a pizza oven. So, we have to protect for all those environments as we take in gas, measure what it's made of, take images, collect measurements of pressure, temperature, winds, all that together in a kind of a "Symphony of Science", and continue communicating all the way till we touch down at the surface at around 25 or 30 miles an hour. That's a lot of engineering. And we can do that now, thanks to very smart engineering systems and technologies that in some senses weren't available to us 50 years ago.

Looking at Venus as a cautionary tale of what can happen when you have runaway greenhouse gases speed the cycle of planetary warming, how can these new missions help us better understand Earth?

So, Venus is a case that, of a destiny of a planet like Earth that, we kind of don't want to live. As you said, a runaway greenhouse that took us from a possibly habitable, nice, more clement Venus billions of years ago, or some of the time in the past, to the Venus of today which is not a habitable world. And this may be a pathway of a lot of big rocky planets with big atmospheres. Maybe something we'll be able to look at with the James Webb Space Telescope as we start interrogating exoplanets. But we need to know the Venus we have next door is our natural laboratory for: What made her evolve differently? Why didn't she persist in an early clement state like our early Earth with oceans and rain, volcanoes, all interacting in this beautiful maelstrom of chemistry and possibilities that of course, led to what we are here on earth today: this beautiful, pale blue, dot? What made Venus evolve differently? What happened to her oceans, if there were ever any? Why her landscapes look bizarre, these highland mountains that we call tesserae, because there's nothing else like them in the solar system. Those are big questions. They're going to take a fleet of missions to understand because that may tell us more about our own destiny and why climate variation, which is common on Earth in time and cycles, where it's going to go. And so, if we understand Venus, and we build models to show why Venus is why she is, then we can look back and say why Earth won't become another Venus, or what on earth could become. So, connecting ourselves by analogy across the planets we have, and projecting that back to our own is a value-added asset as we understand our own home world, which is so precious.

Where could one go to learn more about Venus, this exciting mission, and all of NASA's future plans for returning to Venus?

So, we can go to www.nasa.gov/venus. That's one site, we have a website. If you search on DAVINCI you can see our mission. There’re other Venus assets available as well with connections. And I want to just to say one other thing that, you know, we're all excited about the big questions. We're also personally excited as explorers about what we can do with Venus. And for me, that first image seeing mountains, at people scales, under the clouds, for the first time from above; there have been no missions that have seen things from above at the scales we're used to seeing whether we're landing in a helicopter, or standing at a tower, or looking at a building or, you know, bungee jumping, or whatever we do. We’ll have those views for the first time for humanity of a place that's not earth and never was. That's always going to be remarkable. And that's discovery potential, you know, 1 million, where you will discover things we didn't even know the questions we needed to ask. And those things, in the context of another world with all this incredible chemistry is just going to be something extraordinarily special. And so, I can't wait to get there with all of us going there together.

Finally, I know NASA is big on acronyms. What does the named DAVINCI stand for? And what is the significance behind the name?

Absolutely, and we named her really purposefully for Leonardo da Vinci. And the acronym fits, the "Deep Atmosphere of Venus Investigation of Noble-gases, Chemistry and Imaging", because that's what we're doing. But more importantly, because Da Vinci inspired us to be innovators, and creative and catalytic. And we want to bring that to studying Venus because that inspires us all. These great thinkers of the past, the women and men that we know from history, they inspire us to do better going forward. So, bringing his name with us to Venus is an honor, and a privilege, and that's why we chose it.