“We are all desperately hoping the ‘Venus curse’ will be lifted,” she says. Smrekar is the principal investigator of one of those Venusian hopefuls, and the entire community is holding its breath alongside her. The space agency has four options: one would visit a moon of Neptune, another would rendezvous with a Jovian moon, and two would return to Venus. NASA is about to pick which interplanetary mission-or pair of missions-it will send into space next.
Perhaps the time for answers has finally come. Read | New NASA missions to study Venus, a world overlooked for decades
Yet like some of her steadfast colleagues, she has remained motivated through decades of disappointment by one of the most compelling unanswered questions in planetary science: What transformed Venus-a near twin of Earth in size and composition-into such an unearthly and downright apocalyptic state? Why did these two similar, adjacent planets have such staggeringly divergent stories? “Currently, the Venus community is a bit like Boston Red Sox fans prior to 2004, who lived under the ‘curse of the Bambino’ for endless decades,” Smrekar says, referring to the baseball team’s 86-year championship drought. All the while, Venus-an acidic, superhot, arid and presumably lifeless wasteland-has languished in the shadows. Today, a quarter-century later, most of the global planetary-science community still remains wrapped up in the so-far-fruitless search for Martian life. Just as Smrekar and other Venus-minded researchers were beginning to grapple with the planet’s mysteries, as unveiled by Magellan, sensational claims of life on Mars captured the public imagination. Although it raised a plethora of tantalizing questions about the planet’s past and present, Magellan marked the last time NASA sent a dedicated mission to Venus. Magellan’s explorations ended in 1994 when, its objectives met and its solar-power panels degraded, the orbiter was sent plunging into Venus’s atmosphere. Smrekar recalls watching the initial radar images come in, revealing a bizarre world covered in few craters, a surfeit of volcanoes and rolling plains of frozen lava. Launched in 1989, Magellan was equipped with a sophisticated radar system, one that peered beneath the planet’s omnipresent clouds to map its entire surface for the first time. In some sense, her interplanetary destiny seemed preordained even before she was born: her father hails from a rural community in Pennsylvania named Venus.įittingly, the very first mission Smrekar worked on was NASA’s ambitious (and wildly successful) Venus orbiter Magellan. But instead of becoming an astronaut, she ended up as a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she worked on robotic explorers of other worlds. Like many kids, Sue Smrekar dreamed that she would one day voyage into space.
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