The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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The Envision mission to Venus will explore why Earth's closest neighbour is so different.
Venus is the most Earth-like of the Sun’s terrestrial planets in terms of its size, composition and distance from the Sun. It may even have had a relatively Earth-like climate in its distant past.
Yet at some point in planetary history, the two started to evolve very differently. Venus today has a crushingly dense, toxic atmosphere and a surface that is far too hot to host liquid water. Hence, Venus provides a natural laboratory for studying how habitability – or the lack of it – evolved in the Solar System.
Envision will investigate the planet’s surface, interior and atmosphere with unrivalled accuracy, allowing us to understand how these different layers work and interact with each other.
Note: this image was updated in January 2025.
[Image description: An image of Earth and Venus on a black background, with the Envision spacecraft in the foreground. The left half of Venus shows what it looks like from space, enshrouded in a thick cloud cover (image by NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft), while the right half shows a map of the surface terrain as reconstructed from radar data recorded by NASA's Magellan mission.]