David Grinspoon

But DaVinci is very much a NASA mission, which is still moving forward and being built.

You know, there's some question, as with a lot of projects right now, about the future schedule and everything.

you know, viability.

But right now, nobody's told us it's not happening.

And we're pretty optimistic about, you know, we know that Congress is very supportive of maintaining this mission.

A lot of it's built.

We have an entry sphere and some of the instruments are already built.

And, you know, it's a very challenging engineering problem to drop something into that intense environment of the Venus atmosphere and have it survive to the surface.

Of course.

Okay.

Well, in the upper clouds where the mission starts, we drop it into the atmosphere on a parachute.

And in the upper clouds where it starts to operate, it's actually more or less the same temperature and pressure as the surface of Earth, like in the room you're sitting in now.

That's sort of the middle temperature.

upper clods of Venus.

But as you drop down, it gets hotter and hotter to the point and higher and higher pressure to the point where when you reach the surface, it's 900 degrees hotter than the hottest self-cleaning temperature on your oven.

Fahrenheit.

Fahrenheit.

And it's almost 100 times the surface pressure of Earth.

So crushing pressure, searing temperature.

And by the way, those clouds you drop through are made out of concentrated sulfuric acid, like battery acid.