Modeling the Big Plunge: Davinci Entry, Descent, and Landing

The Deep Atmosphere Venus Inves-tigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission will launch in late 2031 and ex-plore Venus via a probe landing and two flybys. Cur-rently, the probe landing is scheduled for mid-2034 after one Venus flyby. DAVINCI, the 16th selection of the NASA Discovery Class program, intends to quan-tify the chemical composition of the Venusian atmos-phere, taking infrared descent imagery of the surface, and conducting remote observations of the dynamic atmosphere and cloud-deck. The goals are to study the origin, evolution, and current state of Venus, to under-stand if it was habitable at a point in the past, and to create an analog to hot terrestrial exo-planets similar to Venus [1].