DAVINCI

Two spacecraft are to travel to Venus as one. A carrier that Lockheed Martin Space in Denver will build is to fly past the planet, filming the clouds in ultraviolet light and mapping heat that escapes from the surface at night. It is then to release the descent sphere, a sealed titanium vessel just under a metre across carrying five instruments, which is to hang under a parachute, drop free and fall onto Alpha Regio, radioing its measurements to the carrier for relay to Earth. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center leads the mission, with James Garvin as principal investigator. NASA's update of 24 September 2026 has it working toward approval to enter final design and fabrication, and all hardware tested so far is engineering models and test units.

The idea is older than the selection. NASA named DAVINCI a Discovery finalist on 30 September 2015, with Lori Glaze of Goddard as principal investigator, then picked the asteroid missions Lucy and Psyche on 4 January 2017. The team came back as DAVINCI+, and when NASA named four finalists on 13 February 2020 it explained that the plus referred to imaging. On 2 June 2021 NASA selected DAVINCI+ and VERITAS together, awarding each about 500 million dollars for development and expecting both to launch between 2028 and 2030. The team's 2022 mission paper and NASA's pages since drop the plus.

Noble gases were measured at Venus in the late 1970s, by the Pioneer Venus Large Probe and by Soviet Venera probes, but only in part: according to the 2022 mission paper, only neon and argon have been measured robustly, the two reported krypton abundances differ by a factor of fifteen, and xenon has only upper limits. Because noble gases do not react, their amounts and isotopes record what the planet was built from and how much of its early air escaped. Water is the other target. Pioneer Venus measured the deuterium to hydrogen ratio at about 100 times Earth's after its inlet clogged with sulfuric acid droplets; ground-based work gives 120 plus or minus 40 times, and Venus Express data suggest the ratio may rise markedly with altitude. A high ratio could mean the water of evaporated oceans was lost to space, that Venus never had oceans and lost hydrogen from a steam atmosphere, or that water outgassed within the last billion years escaped; the paper cites work for each. Whether Venus once had oceans remains unsettled.

Alpha Regio was chosen because it is thought to be old ground. It is a tessera, terrain that NASA describes as found so far only on Venus and covering about 8 percent of its surface: cracked and wrinkled highlands named for their resemblance to a parquet floor. Alpha Regio stands about 1.6 km above the surrounding lava plains. Tesserae may be the oldest surfaces on the planet, and NASA notes that infrared images suggest some could hold silica-rich rock like the granite of Earth's continents, rock that on Earth forms with the involvement of water, the 2022 paper adds. Those are hypotheses the mission is meant to test. By combining Magellan radar altimetry with Arecibo Observatory radar images, the team has sharpened its maps of Alpha Regio tenfold, to scales below 1 km, NASA reported in October 2024.

Before the drop, the carrier is to observe Venus on two flybys (the 2022 design; NASA Langley's June 2026 abstract has the probe landing after one). Its four VISOR cameras are to image the sunlit clouds in the ultraviolet band of their unidentified absorber and, on the night side, map surface heat leaking through the clouds. CUVIS, a Goddard technology demonstration spectrometer, is to help identify that absorber, which NASA says takes up to half the sunlight Venus receives.

Most of the engineering goes into the sphere. In the 2022 design it is a hermetically sealed titanium vessel of 200 kg, close in size to the Pioneer Venus Large Probe. Its gas inlets stay capped until set altitudes, and drag plates and spin vanes control the fall. Layered insulation and phase-change material keep the electronics within limits while the air outside heats toward 460 degrees Celsius. Engineering papers from NASA Langley call the sphere Zephyr. Lockheed Martin is responsible for the entry system around it: a sphere-cone aeroshell with a carbon-carbon heat shield, a backshell and two parachutes.

About an hour separates entry from touchdown. In the sequence published in 2022, entry begins at about 145 km; the parachutes deploy, the heat shield falls away at around 70 km, and from there the two spectrometers sample the gas all the way down. About 32 minutes after entry the main parachute is released and the sphere falls freely while the descent imager takes near-infrared pictures straight down. Simulations put touchdown 57.04 to 66.7 minutes after entry at 99 percent confidence, with a reference of 59.7 minutes. The design meets every science goal before then and the sphere need not survive landing, but the paper says it has power for about 18 more minutes of work if it does.

Five instruments ride inside. The Venus Mass Spectrometer and the Venus Tunable Laser Spectrometer draw on the Sample Analysis at Mars suite on the Curiosity rover: NASA says the first will study noble gases and trace compounds from about 68 km altitude to near the surface, and the second measures isotope ratios. The Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation records pressure, temperature, winds and accelerations, the Venus Descent Imager looks down in near-infrared light through a sapphire window in the sphere's base, and VfOx, a student-built sensor, measures oxygen fugacity in the lowest part of the atmosphere. NASA says imaging begins below the clouds at about 40 km and that processing should reach nearly 1 m per pixel.

Dates have moved in both directions since 2021. The 2022 mission paper laid out a launch in June 2029 and delivery of the sphere to Alpha Regio on 21 June 2031, a date chosen for good lighting under the clouds. NASA's FY2025 budget request, published in 2024, then cited budget constraints in reducing DAVINCI's funding and moving the launch to a 2031 to 2032 opportunity. It also records a life-cycle cost estimate of 1.2 to 1.6 billion dollars, made in June 2021 as Phase B opened; it and the 500 million dollars of 2021 measure different things, since the Discovery cost cap excludes the launch vehicle and operations.

Through 2026 the date moved forward. The Goddard team's March abstract for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference says Headquarters directed planning for a launch no earlier than 2031 and that a trade study put it on target for December 2031, with entry and descent in April 2034. At the same conference on 17 March, Natasha Johnson of Goddard said the mission now targeted December 2030, releasing the probe in January 2033, according to Space.com. Langley engineers in June still called December 2031 the current baseline, with a one-year acceleration under consideration, while NASA Ames slides of 29 June say development is being accelerated toward a 2030 launch. In early October Garvin told the Venus Exploration Analysis Group that the team had brought the launch forward 54 weeks to late December 2030 on a low-energy trajectory: a Venus flyby in early 2032 is to set up the probe's release for its descent on 3 October 2032, and the carrier should keep enough fuel to enter orbit later, Ars Technica reported on 14 October. NASA's mission page gives no date, and we found no NASA document recording the new date as a formal baseline.

Hardware has been tested in the meantime. A full-scale unit of the sphere was run through the descent temperature profile in early 2021, and in October 2023 a test article dropped from a helicopter over the Utah Test and Training Range fell for 30 seconds, its motion in good agreement with pre-flight models in initial comparisons. In 10 helicopter flights over Crater Island, Utah, from 23 to 25 June 2026, a camera tuned to DAVINCI's near-infrared wavelengths photographed descents lasting nearly 40 minutes; from the images alone the team rebuilt the terrain in three dimensions and told silica-rich rock from iron-rich rock, NASA reported on 14 July. From 28 August to 10 September an engineering model of the probe was taken six times to 465 degrees Celsius in a furnace at Rex Heat Treat in Bedford, Pennsylvania, and came through every cycle unscathed, NASA said on 24 September. Langley's slides put the next reviews in early 2027 for the descent sphere and early 2028 for the entry systems.

The other half of this story is a US budget fight. It began on 30 May 2025, when NASA's technical supplement to the President's FY2026 budget request said that to achieve cost savings DAVINCI, VERITAS and EnVision were eliminated, with zero for DAVINCI in every year from FY2026 to FY2030 and no funding for the Venus Technology project. The Planetary Society counted at least 41 NASA missions the plan would cancel.

Congress answered in two voices. Senate Report 119-44, of 17 July 2025, directed NASA to continue DAVINCI and VERITAS with not less than 99.0 and 36.1 million dollars respectively, plus 68.9 million for the VenSAR radar, NASA's contribution to ESA's EnVision; the House committee's report of 12 September 2025 did not mention Venus. The final bill, Public Law 119-74 of 23 January 2026, makes the amounts in the joint explanatory statement's table minimums, and that table lists DAVINCI at 99.0 million dollars. VERITAS and VenSAR are not in the table; their amounts rest on the Senate report, which the joint statement says carries the same weight as its own language unless otherwise noted. NASA has since pulled out of VenSAR, citing its budget, a NASA programme scientist confirmed in October 2026 (Ars Technica).

NASA's allocation came months later. At a town hall in March, Louise Prockter, director of NASA's planetary science division, said the bill gave planetary science 2.54 billion dollars, about 200 million less than the year before, so not everything could continue; it provided 99 million dollars for DAVINCI, she said, according to Space.com. NASA's July 2026 spending plan settled the numbers: 2,581.9 million dollars for Planetary Science (the joint statement's table shows 2,541.2 million), 99.0 million for DAVINCI and 24.0 million for VERITAS, less than the Senate's 36.1 million.

The second round began on 3 April 2026. NASA's FY2027 request asks for 18,829.1 million dollars for the agency, against 24,438.3 million enacted for FY2026, and does not name DAVINCI, VERITAS or EnVision, neither describing their cancellation nor funding them. Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, analysing the request on 23 April, read it as eliminating NASA's entire Venus portfolio and observed that no other destination in the Solar System faced a comparable elimination.

The argument is not over. The House Appropriations Committee's draft FY2027 report, for its markup of 13 May 2026, names missions from NEO Surveyor to the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, but not Venus. By 30 October the committee had cleared all twelve FY2027 bills, but the full House had passed only three, none of them the bill that funds NASA, and the Senate Appropriations Committee had finalised none, SpacePolicyOnline reported. A continuing resolution, Public Law 119-103, funds the government at the FY2026 rate until 11 December 2026, and DAVINCI's 99.0 million dollars from FY2026 remain available until 30 September 2027. Congress returns on 9 November with every FY2027 bill unfinished. Ars Technica reported that ending NASA's part in EnVision and cancelling Mars Sample Return freed money for DAVINCI and VERITAS.

NASA describes DAVINCI, should it fly, as the first U.S.-led mission into the atmosphere of Venus since 1978 and its probe as the first spacecraft to descend through that atmosphere since the Soviet Vega 2 lander in 1985. Its descent images, NASA says, would be the first photographs of the surface in more than 40 years, after the Venera landers (Venera 9 and 10, Venera 13 and 14), and the first taken of tessera terrain.