The EnVision mission concept to Venus has been selected from 25 proposals of medium size missions to the Solar System put forward by the scientific community.
It is now among the candidate missions which will be launched in the near future. The European Space Agency – ESA made the announcement a few days ago.
And the news quickly reached the University of Trento, which is one of the project’s main partners. “We are heavily involved”, commented Lorenzo Bruzzone, professor of the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science and head of the Remote Sensing Laboratory of the University of Trento. “We are part of the core team of the mission coordination and we are in charge of the subsurface radar sounder. The latter is one of the three instruments of the mission, a radar capable of penetrating Venus’ surface to analyse its sub-surface and, among other things, observe Venusian volcanoes”, he explained.
The goal of EnVision, which will include collaboration from Nasa, is to map the surface and sub-surface of Venus and to obtain detailed radar images of the planet. What are the expectations? Why is ESA’s mission to Venus so important?
Bruzzone affirmed that “EnVision will help understand why Venus, which should be the most Earth-like of all our planetary neighbours given its size and position in the Solar System, evolved so differently compared to the Earth. We have plenty of information about Mars but our knowledge of Venus is limited, and bridging this gap is one of the objectives of the mission. EnVision’s other objectives focus, among other things, on the nature and current state of geological (and volcanic) activity on Venus and on its relationship with the atmosphere. Some think that the results EnVision will achieve will inspire the next generation of European scientists and engineers in planetary science”.