The spacecraft named after the scientist and Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci will be tasked with exploring the planet that NASA believes is most similar to Earth.

Photo depicting the preliminary structure of the DAVINCI spacecraft – (Photo: NASA).

According to NASA, this naming is inspired by the great vision of the eminent scientist, with the expectation that DAVINCI will delve into the mysterious history of Venus to bring back unprecedented data about its “brother”. Earth’s twin”.

Like many previous NASA-led studies, Venus was born to be habitable just like Earth: Located in the middle of the life zone, capable of preserving liquid water and all the conditions to become a planet. green like the earth.

However, the planet’s unfortunate evolution – possibly due to a period of too intense geological activity – caused the planet’s rotation speed to stagnate, and the atmosphere was covered with harmful gases. causing a catastrophic greenhouse effect, the ultimate result of which is a “broken Earth”, no longer able to preserve life.

However, some studies still suggest that living creatures are somehow still hiding on this mysterious planet, for example in the dense sea of ​​clouds. There is also evidence that the planet may still be geologically active, a factor that makes it “alive”.

According to SciTech Daily, NASA’s DAVINCI will be responsible for explaining those answers: This spacecraft will search for clues about mysterious molecules in the Venusian cloud sea, measuring the chemical composition of these clouds. , studied a number of rocks in the highlands as well as for the first time directly photographed mountains on the planet, similar to what NASA did for Mars.

DAVINCI is expected to open the door to the “new Renaissance” of Venus, according to NASA – (Photo: NASA).

All these measurements make Venus an important “laboratory” for our understanding of Earth’s own history.

DAVINCI also paves the way for a series of NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) missions in the 2030s, by breaking new ground as it helps determine whether Venus is – or at least once was – whether there is an ocean, and how its atmosphere -climate system has evolved over billions of years.

Another important answer that NASA hopes DAVINCI will answer is whether Venus really had life or not, as well as how that life was lost in the planet’s history.

DAVINCI is still being built by NASA, with renderings depicting a strange, spherical spacecraft that appears to “parachute” to Venus after being taken there by another craft.