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A satellite designed to study Venus from top to bottom and a trio of gravitational wave-servicing spacecraft are two of the latest missions undertaken by the European Space Agency.
The missions were previously selected by the agency, but the official adoption process means that contractors will be selected so that construction can begin to bring the mission designs to life.
ESA will partner with NASA for both missions, which will be launched from the European Spaceport in French Guiana in the 2030s.
“These innovative missions will take us to the next level in two very exciting areas of space science and will keep European researchers at the forefront of these areas,” Carole Mundell, ESA’s science director, said in a statement.
A new journey to Venus
The EnVision Venus probe will study the never-before-seen planet in detail, from its inner core to the top of its atmosphere, to help astronomers understand why the hot, toxic world like Earth didn’t survive. Venus is similar in size and distance from the sun to Earth, and some researchers believe the planet may even have an Earth-like climate at some point.
But “Earth’s twin” is now an inhospitable world, with surface temperatures capable of melting lead and intense pressure, pressure resulting from a running greenhouse effect.
Scientists hope the mission will answer key questions about Venus, including how the world has changed over time and whether it ever had oceans, how geologically active it is and why the greenhouse effect started was running.
EnVision is expected to launch in 2031 and will be the first mission to collect data on how the atmosphere, surface and interior of Venus interact. The mission builds on the first ESA spacecraft launched to map the planet’s atmosphere, Venus Express, which orbited Venus from 2005 to 2014.
After a 15-month journey to Venus, EnVision will spend another 15 months orbiting the planet and flying through its atmosphere.
The satellite will have two deployable solar arrays and will carry a suite of instruments that can observe the surface and atmosphere of Venus as well as probe beneath the planet’s thick, obscuring clouds with radar and radio waves.
It is one of several missions being developed to study Venus, including NASA’s DAVINCI and VERITAS missions to be launched within the next decade.
Free world history presentation,
When massive celestial objects such as black holes collide, they send out ripples called gravitational waves that spread across the universe and reveal information about their history.
These waves have been detected by ground-based observatories, but the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, will be the first space-based observatory to study the cosmic phenomenon. Ground-based observatories are limited in what they can detect based on size and sensitivity, so they can only pick up high-frequency gravitational waves.
But a space-based observatory can be much more, and LISA will be able to detect waves ranging from large to low-frequency waves emitted by merging supermassive black holes at the center of massive galaxies.
The LISA mission involves three spacecraft flying 2.5 million kilometers (about 1.6 million miles) apart in a triangle-shaped formation. Free-floating gold cubes will be used inside each spacecraft to detect gravitational waves.
The mission was born out of the success of the LISA Pathfinder, launched by the ESA in 2015 to demonstrate the technology that the LISA mission will rely on to search the universe for cosmic rays.
The new mission will search for evidence of black hole mergers across the universe, study the formation of thousands of pairs of stars known as binary systems, peers inside dense star clusters within galaxies and try to determine the rate at which the universe is expanding its measurement. And LISA will be used to study the history of the universe by finding the first black holes ever formed after the big bang.
Together, the three spacecraft will fly behind Earth as it orbits the sun, about 50 million kilometers (31 million miles) from our planet. The agency expects the mission to last four years, with the possibility of extension.
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