Transcripts of Quick Shot Interview - Mars and Venus Conjunction-Jim



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[slate] Well they can look in the night sky and there are websites that will describe the exact viewing geometrics that will allow them to see this very special conjunction where our two nearest neighbor planets - our brother planet Mars, named for the God of War and our sister planet Venus, the Goddess of love, will both appear. And so you’ll be able to see that in the night sky after dusk and the exact details are available on various NASA websites. 

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[slate] Absolutely Venus is hot now. And you know we’ve all said Mars is cool but Venus is hotter. And right now NASA has selected two Venus missions to explore our sister for the first time in decades. One which will global map the surface with advanced radar and inferred radiation to give us that global perspective of a world like our own. And the other - our Davinci mission - will bring a spacecraft for the first time developed by NASA into the atmosphere with a chemistry lab and human-scale vision to see that planet in a cross-section of its spectacular atmosphere where there is mysteries literally abounding. And those two missions together will be the bookends to make a new Venus appear, a lost frontier coming alive. 

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[slate] In our solar system we have two neighborly planets. Mars where we’ve had intensive efforts for the last 25 years and great progress. And Venus our kind of forgotten sister. And so Venus rather surprisingly offers greater clues to possible evolutionary and pathways for big Earth-like planets like our own, both in our solar system and beyond. We should be able to see with our next generation space observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope like the Nancy Roman, we should be able to sense the planets like Venus with big atmospheres and rocky planetary surfaces light years away. So getting to know to our own Venus next door will help us make that link from our sister planet who perhaps lost her habitable environment to those that are way beyond. And that connection is important in this blooming era of astrophysics and planetary exploration. So Venus really is special. 

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[slate] So people can go to solarsystem.nasa.gov on the web and they will see details of our next voyages to Venus with Davinici and Veritas, and connections to past missions like the Magellan mission of the 90s and all the way back to the 70s. Venus is our new frontier and we are so excited to be going