Some scientists are attempting to send a crewed mission to examine Venus en route to Mars. The Guardian reported a new proposal from scientist Noam Izenberg, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Speaking at the International Astronomical Congress in Paris, Izenberg advocated looking at Venus, a planet much closer to Earth than Mars. “Venus gets a bad rap because it has such a difficult surface environment,” Izenberg said, according to The Guardian. “NASA’s current paradigm is from the Moon to Mars. We are trying to support Venus as an additional target on that path,” Izenberg added, according to the report. Venus is known, according to NASA, as Earth’s twin due to its similar size and structure. However, it is largely inhospitable to human life, given its surface temperature of nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Izenberg has argued for the transit of Venus in several reports. In 2020, he suggested that a crewed flyby of Venus en route to Mars would essentially be a “two planets for the price of one plus” opportunity for space exploration. In a 2022 submission to the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology, Izenberg and his co-authors — Mallory Lefland and Alexander MacDonald — again pushed for more effort to study Venus. “Venus is the ‘Venera Incognito’, a vast, almost completely unexplored world of great variety, mystery and beauty, with an area of uncharted territory many times the land area of Earth,” they wrote in the report. The authors also claimed that Venus is “the most Earth-like and Earth-relevant world we will ever get to explore up close,” adding that they believed the planet to be “an endless wonderland of captivating and mysterious aspects and formations”.
