In the desire to become interplanetary, while the first destination is Mars, its closest rival could be Venus, as Earth begins planning several missions to the next-door neighbour. However, before deciding to go to Venus, a critical need will be to figure out the organic and chemical composition of the planet.
Who better than Davinci to aid this search.
The Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging mission a.k.a Davinci will launch to Venus in 2029 to figure out the science. The spacecraft will have a dedicated instrument to find the amount of oxygen present near the surface of the planet. It will be equipped with Venus Oxygen Fugacity (VfOx), a small, button-sized sensor that will conduct the groundbreaking measurements.
Nasa said that by analysing these ground-breaking VfOx measurements, scientists will, for the first time, seek to identify what minerals are most stable at the surface of Venus in the highlands and link the formation of rocks to their recent modification histories.
WHAT IS VFOX?
Venus Oxygen Fugacity (VfOx) is being designed by undergraduate and graduate students for the DAVINCI mission to Venus’ atmosphere. The sensor will be mounted on the outside of the Descent Sphere, where it will measure the oxygen fugacity the partial pressure of the oxygen in the deep atmosphere beneath Venus’ clouds.
The descent probe will enter Venus after two years of arriving in Venus' orbit, ingesting and analysing atmospheric gases and collecting images as it descends to the surface of the planet at the Alpha Regio region. VFX will operate similarly to the oxygen sensor in many automobile engines, which measures the amount of oxygen in the fuel system relative to other components of the fuel.
"Understanding how much oxygen is contained in Venus’ atmosphere will be important in preparation for characterizing Venus-like worlds beyond our solar system with the JWST and future observatories. How much oxygen Venus has in its deepest atmosphere will help scientists study these remote worlds," Nasa said in a statement.
WHAT IS DAVINCI MISSION?
The Davinci mission will measure the composition of Venus’ atmosphere to understand how it was formed and has evolved, as well as determine whether the planet ever had an ocean. The mission will aim to find the first clues to the possibility of life ever existing on Venus.
Venus and Earth are similar in size and density, so hypothetically, these planets could be very similar. And yet, they are strikingly different. The spacecraft will aim to look at signs of changes on the planet that could be replicated on Earth as well due to climate change.
DAVINCI+ just like its namesake will return the first high-resolution images of this world detailing its geological features, which may be comparable to Earth’s continents, suggesting that Venus has plate tectonics.
The motivating goal for DAVINCI’s Student Collaboration Experiment is educating and training young scientists and engineers in planetary science and engineering skills and providing a real-world application for those skills. “We are trying to engage and encourage the next generation of planetary scientists and engineers,” says Dr. Noam Izenberg, principal research staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and student collaboration lead for VfOx on DAVINCI.
Students will build the VfOx instrument, analyze the data it returns from Venus, and participate in science activities with the DAVINCI science team. Students involved will be advised by faculty at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimor
The excitement of being actively involved with a real space-flight mission as an undergraduate may be one of the best incentives to attract a diverse group of students to this project. “We want to attract more students from all backgrounds, including the less-advantaged and the less-represented,” says Dr. Izenberg. “There will be lots of mentors across the board – on the mission and science side, and the engineering side – where students can find not just mentors of the professions that they might be looking for, but also mentors who look like them, because the DAVINCI team itself is fairly good in its own diversity
Johns Hopkins will be working in collaboration with the Applied Physics Lab to plan and implement the student experiment. Johns Hopkins will also work in collaboration with the Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore, which has an extreme arts institute that will be involved with an intersection between science and art. The Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute in Baltimore will help coordinate this project, and Morgan State University in Baltimore is an intended partner.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the principal investigator institution for DAVINCI and will perform project management and scientific leadership for the mission, as well as project systems engineering to develop the probe flight system. Goddard also leads the project science support team and provides two key instruments on the pro
be .”e.he probe
You must be logged in to post a comment.