--- title: "Europe Is Also Sending a Spacecraft to Explore Venus, a Blazing Hellhole" description: "The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced it is also planning to take a trip to Venus to get a closer look." date: "2021-06-10" modified: "2021-06-10" authors: - name: "Victor Tangermann" job_title: "Senior Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor" url: "https://futurism.com/europe-nasa-venus-blazing-hellhole" categories: - "Off-World" - "Space" tags: - "ESA" - "NASA" - "Venus" --- # Europe Is Also Sending a Spacecraft to Explore Venus, a Blazing Hellhole ![The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced it is also planning to take a trip to Venus to get a closer look.]() *\Image: ESA\* The European Space Agency (ESA) [has announced that]() it's also planning to take a trip to Venus. It'll be joining NASA, which [recently announced]() two missions to our closest planetary neighbor, a planet that NASA hasn't visited in over 30 years. The rush of interest in Venus shows that scientists are itching to study the second planet from the Sun, which shares plenty of qualities with our own — despite being an uninhabitable, blazing hell hole. The ESA's mission will be called EnVision and it will be equipped with a high resolution camera called VenSAR, provided by NASA, that will take high resolution measurements of the planet's surface features. VenSAR is a vast upgrade over NASA's Magellan mission, which captured much lower resolution images of the planet in the early 1990s. The instrument could uncover secrets about Venus's volcanoes, landslides, and larger tectonic movements. "EnVision’s VenSAR will provide a unique perspective with its targeted studies of the Venus surface, enriching the roadmap of Venus exploration," said Adriana Ocampo, EnVision Program Scientist at NASA, in [a statement](). Scientists are also excited to find out more about Venusian "tesserae," the planet's equivalent of Earth's continents. "If they're made of basalt, that would imply fresh, virgin magma erupting on to the surface everywhere, all of a similar composition," Philippa Mason, an EnVision science team-member from Imperial College London, UK, [told the *BBC*](). "But if those 'continents' actually have a very different composition — if they're granitic in nature — that would mean that at some stage in the past there's been water in the mantle of Venus because you make granite from wet magma," she added. "Envision will be able to distinguish between granite and basalt — and other flavors of rock." In addition to VenSAR, EnVision will carry a second radar unit that can scan the planet's makeup to a depth of .62 miles. The spacecraft will also be carrying spectrometers to look for hotspots and track the composition of the Venusian atmosphere. "EnVision will probe the links between its atmosphere, surface and interior to discover why Venus is so different, giving us the keys to understanding Earth-sized planets everywhere," Envision lead scientist Richard Ghail from the University of London, UK, told the *BBC*. Despite the excitement, the EnVision mission has yet to be fully greenlit by the ESA. But barring unforeseen complications, there's a good chance the mission, alongside NASA's two missions, will launch in the early 2030s. **READ MORE:** [Then There Were 3: NASA to Collaborate on ESA’s New Venus Mission]() \[NASA\] **More on Venus missions:** *[NASA Is Officially Headed Back to Venus]()* ## Author I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()