David Grinspoon

So you have to be able to withstand all these crazy environmental factors.

And we know how to do it.

You know, this thing is well engineered, but it has to be done very carefully.

And you have to use some expensive materials.

Both.

A lot of the important part of this mission is involving measurements of the atmosphere that have never been made before.

Because again, we haven't been able to operate that much in the Venus atmosphere because it's so forbidding.

So we've never had modern instrumentation, never had 21st century instruments that can really tell us exactly what those gases are made out of, exactly what the isotopes are of hydrogen and what the rare gases are.

All these things that really can be diagnostic of the history of the planet.

We've never measured them

and the radiation going down, but we're also going to do really cool things with the surface.

We have a imaging system where we do the first ever descent photography, like really high resolution stereo descent photography of this very mountainous area where we're going to land.

Yeah, you've seen those famous images from like the Ranger program of the moon, right?

Where they get closer and closer and closer and then the thing crashes.

We're going to do that for Venus, except again with 21st century cameras.

And it's never been seen before.

And this is going to be a very dramatic mountainous region with really cool and revealing topography, not just in the visual wavelengths, but also in the infrared.

So we'll be able to tell what the minerals are there.

Well, we are going to crash.

Oh, wow.