The first U.S. mission to Venus in more than three decades, VERITAS will study Earth's sister planet from crust to core.

VERITAS is the next mission in NASA's Discovery Program of smaller, focused missions to explore the solar system, following Lucy (launched in 2021) and Psyche (launched in 2022).

VERITAS is an acronym for "Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy." The word veritas means “truth” in Latin, and the mission will reveal the truth of how Venus’ and Earth’s paths diverged. Led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the mission will help scientists understand how Venus became an inhospitable inferno, while Earth evolved to become home to an abundance of life.

VERITAS will unlock the secrets of Venus’ surface and interior evolution by searching for evidence of past and present water, providing an inventory of current and recent volcanic and surface activity, and answering critical questions about the evolution of rocky planets.

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global surface of Venus Global map of Venus' surface created using radar images from NASA's Magellan mission. VERITAS will improve on Magellan's maps by orders of magnitude, greatly enhancing our knowledge of appearance of features on the surface and their topography. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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