(gentle music)
- [Narrator] It's known as Earth's evil twin.
- Venus gives us a glimpse
into both our past and our future,
a past where water formed and perhaps life arose
before it did on Earth,
and our future where Earth will heat up.
So, Venus is a fascinating place
to look at Earth in a mirror.
- [Narrator] The two planets are close
in age, size and makeup.
But unlike Earth,
Venus evolved into a kind of toxic wasteland.
It lost its surface water
and became hot enough to melt lead.
So, what happened?
Researchers are hoping to answer that question
and whether Venus may have once been brimming with life
with three new missions to the hot planet.
- They will offer the entire science community
the chance to investigate a planet
we haven't been to in more than 30 years.
- [Narrator] In those 30 years,
much of the attention has gone to Mars.
- Mars is not like Earth and Venus. Mars is much smaller.
It's only about four seventh the size of Earth.
Venus turns out to be the other planet in our solar system
which is the most Earth-like,
but yet a horrible fate has befallen Venus.
- [Narrator] Dr. Darby Dyar is among a group of scientists
working on the new missions to Venus.
She's part of the scientific leadership team
for one called VERITAS.
And it's set to launch at the end of the decade.
The spacecraft will take a census
of the rock types on Venus.
That data is essential for understanding
what happened to Venus,
and if it hosted life, where it might've been.
- Imagine that sometime in the last billion years,
Earth was completely covered by basalt. (chuckles)
The only thing that would stick up from the basaltic ocean
if that happened, would be the continents, the high places.
So, it's sort of like the Noah's ark on a planet.
- [Narrator] Basalt are dark, fine-grained rocks,
the kind that line the ocean floors here on Earth.
Continents are made up mostly of a different kind of rock
called granite, which is lighter.
Scientists are interested in granites
because they form in the presence of water,
a key molecule for life.
On Venus, those are the two primary rocks
that VERITAS wants to locate and ID.
And it's gonna try to do that as it orbits Venus.
- It's staggering to me that we know so little
about the surface of Venus and what that means
is that anything we find with these missions
is gonna be really amazing and exciting
and first of its kind.
- [Narrator] That huge undertaking
comes down in part to this sensor.
Before launch, Dyar and her collaborators
are training the device and its machine learning brains
on Earth rocks.
Let's take a look at how that process works.
(machine whirring)
First, Dyar collected a diverse set of rocks.
Then they were cut and ground.
The samples are then sent to a lab
at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin.
There, researchers heat up the rock chips
to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit
in this so-called Venus Chamber.
(switch clicks)
It's meant to mimic the surface temperatures on the planet.
At such high temperatures,
rocks heat up so much that they glow.
The kind of light they give off
depends on what the rocks are made of.
Dark basalts emit more light than lighter granites.
That light is captured by the prototype VERITAS Sensor
through a special kind of glass window on the Venus Chamber.
Eventually when VERITAS reaches Venus,
its sensors will scan the planet and compare the new data
to rocks they've studied here on Earth.
- The geological processes act the same
and therefore, the rock types, we are fairly confident,
are going to be the same.
- [Narrator] If VERITAS can map out
granite formations on Venus, that could help scientists
figure out where to send future landers
to narrow down the search for signs of life.
Habitability, that's the end game.
- Not only do we care about habitability on Earth and Venus,
but we also care about the habitability of objects
in other solar systems throughout the universe,
which are called exoplanets.
And if there are other Earth and Venus-like objects
out there, then maybe we're not alone.
And that's a really important question
that we'd really love to understand.
(bright music)