NASA will be sending two missions to Venus for the first time in more than three decades.
The space agency announced on Wednesday, June 2, that two $500 million missions will be launched within the next 10 years.
Administrator Bill Nelson said the missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, will journey to Venus as part of the space agency's Discovery program, Daily Mail reports.
In a press release, NASA said: "The missions aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world when it has so many other characteristics similar to ours - and may have been the first habitable world in the solar system, complete with an ocean and Earth-like climate."
Discover more about NASA's return to Venus in the video below:DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) is being sent to Venus in a bid to discover how the planet formed and evolved and establish if it has ever had an ocean, something it will do by measuring its atmosphere.
The mission will also look for the existence of noble gases (such as helium, neon, argon, and krypton) and ascertain why, when compared to Earth, it is a '"runaway hothouse."
Last year, Venus received a lot of attention when scientists claimed that phosphine gas, which is produced by certain microorganisms when there is no oxygen, was allegedly discovered on the planet.
A separate study, however, said that only standard "ordinary" sulfur dioxide was detected.
The New York Times reports that the instruments which measure noble gasses could also establish whether or not there is phosphine on Mars.
High-resolution images of Venus' "tesserae", which are similar to the continents on Earth, will also be sent back by DAVINCI+.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science, said in the statement: "Using cutting-edge technologies that NASA has developed and refined over many years of missions and technology programs, we're ushering in a new decade of Venus to understand how an Earth-like planet can become a hothouse.
"Our goals are profound. It is not just understanding the evolution of planets and habitability in our own solar system, but extending beyond these boundaries to exoplanets, an exciting and emerging area of research for NASA."
NASA has made two missions to venus in recent history - namely, the Pioneer-Venus project in 1978 and Magellan.
After returning to Venus in August of 1990, Magellan observed the planet for four years until radio contact was lost with the vessel on October 12, 1994.
CNN reports that other missions including the Parker Solar Probe, which discovered the existence of a radio signal from the planet's atmosphere in May, have also passed Venus.