- Some scientists are calling for a manned mission to Venus en route to Mars.
- Venus is a valuable target for studies despite its hostile surface environment, said Noam Izenberg.
- In a report, Izenberg described Venus as “an endless wonderland of alluring and mysterious sights.”
Loading Loading something.
Some scientists argue for sending a manned mission to examine Venus en route to Mars.
The Guardian reported on a new proposal by scientist Noam Izenberg, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris, Izenberg advocated a flyby examination of Venus, a planet much closer to Earth than Mars.
“Venus has a bad reputation because it has such a difficult surface environment,” Izenberg said, per The Guardian.
“Nasa’s current paradigm is from the moon to Mars. We are trying to defend Venus as an additional target on that track,” Izenberg added, according to the outlet.
Venus is known by NASA as Earth’s twin due to its similar size and structure. However, it is largely inhospitable to human life, given its surface temperature of nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
Izenberg has defended the Venus flyby in several reports. In 2020, he proposed that a crewed flyby of Venus en route to Mars would essentially be a “two planets for the price of one” opportunity for space exploration.
In a 2022 presentation at the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology, Izenberg and his co-authors, Mallory Lefland and Alexander MacDonald, again pushed for more effort to study Venus.
“Venus is ‘Venera Incognito,’ a vast, almost completely unexplored world of great variety, mystery, and beauty, with an area of unknown land several times the land surface of Earth,” they wrote in the report.
The authors also argued that Venus is “the most Earth-like and Earth-relevant world we’ll ever be able to explore up close,” adding that they believed the planet to be “an endless wonderland of sights and seductive and mysterious formations”.