Future orbiting and in-situ exploration of Venus: Mount Etna as terrestrial analogue

The exploration of Venus will soon experience a new golden era thanks to the recently selected NASA Deep Atmosphere of Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission, NASA Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topogra-phy & Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission, and ESA EnVision mission. The DAVINCI mission will focus on the analysis of the the atmospheric vertical structure and composition of Earth’s twin planet and on the geologic structure of a tesserae terrain. The VERITAS mission will investigate the geologic fea-tures of its surface as well as geodynamic characteris-tics of the subsurface, providing high-resolution emis-sivity data, a global radar map at an approximate reso-lution of 30 meters/pixel, and estimation of the gravity anomaly of the shallow crust of the planet. The ESA EnVision mission will be complementary to the two NASA missions, providing high resolution 0.8-2.5 micron emissivity data, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, and Subsurface Radar Sounder (SRS) data. Beyond those, the proposed Roscosmos-NASA Venera-D mission will also be equipped with an orbit-er that will investigate the atmospheric composition and circulation, as well as a lander that will analize the in-situ chemical composition and the surface-atmosphere interactions. While preparing for the new missions being selected and proposed on Venus, it is crucially important to select analogue areas on Earth that may be suitable for a direct comparison with orbiting and in-situ surface data to be retrieved in the near future from the future missions to Venus. We recently proposed active vol-canic areas of Venus, in particular Imdr Regio with its major volcanic structure Idunn Mons, as the likely most suitable target area for future orbiting and in-situ investigations on Venus. In this regard, we started the analysis and classification of the spectral features as well as chemical chararacteristics of the lava flow samples from potentially comparable terrestrial analogue locations, such as the Mount Etna composite volcano.