Exploring Planet Venus' Alpha Regio Region | NASA's DAVINCI Mission
Scheduled to launch in the early 2030s, NASA's DAVINCI mission will explore Venus with a spacecraft and a descent probe. DAVINCI’s probe will be the first in the 21st century to brave Venus’ atmosphere as it descends from above the planet’s clouds down to its surface. The DAVINCI spacecraft will study Venus’ clouds and highlands during two flybys. It also will release a spherical probe, about 3 feet wide, that will plunge through the planet’s thick atmosphere and corrosive clouds, taking measurements and capturing high-resolution images of the Venusian surface as it descends below the clouds.
Alpha Regio is a region of Venus extending for about 1500 kilometers centered at 22°S, 5°E. The surface of the region is what is known as tessera, meaning a terrain that has been highly deformed and where the deformation strikes in multiple directions and is closely spaced.
Like all tessera regions, it sits above the surrounding terrain at an elevation of 1 to 2 kilometers, and is heavily deformed by what appears to be contractional folding. Like most tessera units, the surrounding volcanic plains appear to have flowed around Alpha's margins and thus are younger than Alpha. An infrared map prepared by the Venus Express orbiter shows that the rocks on the Alpha Regio plateau are lighter in color and look old compared to the majority of the planet. On Earth, such light-colored rocks are usually granite and form continents.
https://ssed.gsfc.nasa.gov/davinci/mission
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
James Tralie (ADNET Systems, Inc.): Producer, Editor
James Garvin (NASA, Chief Scientist Goddard): Scientist,
Animators: Walt Feimer (eMITS), Jenny McElligott, Jonathan North (eMITS), Adriana Manrique Gutierrez (eMITS), Michael Lentz (eMITS), Krystofer Kim (eMITS)
Duration: 1 minute, 13 seconds
Release Date: March 5, 2026
#NASA #Space #Astronomy #Science #Planet #Venus #Atmosphere #Chemistry #AlphaRegio #Habitability #Astrobiology #DAVINCISpacecraft #DAVINCIMission #SolarSystem #SpaceExploration #GSFC #JPL #JHUAPL #UM #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #Animation #HD #Video
No comments:
Post a Comment