Earth and Mineral Sciences

EarthTalks: Getty to discuss NASA’s upcoming DAVINCI mission launching June 2029

Stephanie Getty, research planetary scientist and director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Credit: (NASA/Stephanie Getty). All Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Our nearest neighbor in the inner solar system, Venus, is currently a dramatically inhospitable planet, characterized by sulfuric acid clouds, crushing pressures and searing temperatures near its volcanically scarred surface. Stephanie Getty, research planetary scientist and director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, will discuss the upcoming DAVINCI Mission at 4 p.m. on Monday, April 24.

Getty’s talk, titled "Building a New Understanding of Venus: the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) Mission,” will be held in 112 Walker Building and via Zoom.

NASA’s DAVINCI mission will study the origin, evolution and present state of Venus in unprecedented detail from near the top of the clouds to the planet’s surface. The goal of the mission is to help answer longstanding questions about Earth’s neighboring planet, especially whether Venus was ever wet and habitable.

Getty’s talk is part of EESI’s spring 2023 EarthTalks speaker series, “Exploration of our Solar System.” We now live in the golden age of solar system exploration. With a dozen NASA missions currently in development — as well as spacecraft actively on Mars, near Jupiter and in the Kuiper belt — the current scale of mission activity is unprecedented and brings forth a new era of comparative study of varied worlds at the systems level. The 2023 spring EarthTalk series is intended to provide a venue for the expansion of participant’s horizons into our solar system.

The series is supported by Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. Talks are also available via Zoom. For more information about the spring 2023 series, visit the EarthTalks web page.

Last Updated April 18, 2023

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