Venus hides a wealth of information that could help us better understand Earth and exoplanets, or those planets outside our solar system. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is designing mission concepts to survive the planet's extreme temperatures and atmospheric pressure. This image is a composite of data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter.
Venus is Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor. The two new Discovery Program missions to study our neighbor aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world when it has so many other characteristics similar to ours – and may have been the first habitable world in the solar system, complete with an ocean and Earth-like climate.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech