Some facts about the devices and methods for studying Venus
Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Union sent 16 exploration missions to Venus. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made several flybys of Venus, utilizing the planet’s gravity assist. The DAVINCI mission, consisting of a flyby spacecraft and a lander, is scheduled to launch in the early 2030s. Using solid oxide electrolysis, EVE enables the exploration of Venus using balloons of unlimited duration. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft was on a trajectory to perform a gravity assist pass by Venus on August 31, 2025. The Japanese space agency reported losing contact with its intrepid Akatsuki spacecraft, designed to explore Venus, in May 2024.
The latest facts about our planetary neighbor, Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun and Earth’s closest planetary neighbor. Venus is the third-brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. Venus rotates slowly, in the opposite direction to most planets. Several Russian Venera probes have detected particles about a micron in length in the lower layers of Venus’s atmosphere—roughly the same size as a bacterium on Earth.
Scientists have linked the development of life with a magnetic field and concluded about magnetic fields on other planets
The weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field has led to a dramatic acceleration in the evolution of multicellular life. Fossil evidence has been found in Brazil and South Africa that the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field was about 30 times weaker than today’s values at the end of the Ediacaran period, about 590 to 560 million years ago. One of the defining features of the Earth is its magnetic field. It forms a protective shield against high-energy particles ejected by the Sun, and thus may have provided a safer place for life to grow into the complex array of organisms we see today.
Roscosmos: nuclear tug “Zeus” will go to explore the natural satellites of Jupiter
Today, the satellites of Jupiter – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – attract the closest attention of scientists around the world and are even considered as objects for colonization in the distant future. It has been established that some of them have oceans covered with ice, from under which steam sometimes escapes, and some tectonic activity is observed, which indicates a hot core of the celestial body. Heat and water are necessary conditions for the existence of life. The presence of people on the nuclear tug during the research is not planned at this stage.
Venus has attracted special attention from the Russian scientific community
Phosphine, a byproduct of anaerobic biology, was discovered on Venus.