The relatively unconstrained internal structure of Venus is a missing piece in our understanding of the Solar System formation and evolution. To determine the seismic structure of Venus’ interior, the detection of seismic waves generated by venusquakes is crucial, as recently shown by the new seismic and geodetic constraints on Mars’ interior obtained by the InSight mission. In the next decades multiple missions will fly to Venus to explore its tectonic and volcanic activity, but they will not be able to conclusively report on seismicity or detect actual seismic waves. Looking towards the next fleet of Venus missions in the future, various concepts to measure seismic waves have already been explored in the past decades. These detection methods include typical geophysical ground sensors already deployed on Earth, the Moon, and Mars; pressure sensors on balloons; and airglow imagers on orbiters to detect ground motion, the infrasound signals generated by seismic waves, and the corresponding airglow variations in the upper atmosphere. Here, we provide a first comparison between the detection capabilities of these different measurement techniques and recent estimates of Venus’ seismic activity. In addition, we discuss the performance requirements and measurement durations required to detect seismic waves with the various detection methods. As such, our study clearly presents the advantages and limitations of the different seismic wave detection techniques and can be used to drive the design of future mission concepts aiming to study the seismicity of Venus.

Venus is a terrestrial planet with dimensions similar to the Earth, but a vastly differentgeodynamic evolution, with recent studies debating the occurrence and extent of tectonic-like processes happening on the planet. The precious direct data that we have for Venusis very little, and there are only few numerical modeling studies concerning lithospheric-scale processes. However, the use of numerical models has proven crucial for our under-standing of large-scale geodynamic processes of the Earth. Therefore, here we adapt 2Dthermo-mechanical numerical models of rifting on Earth to Venus to study how the ob-served rifting structures on the Venusian surface could have been formed. More specif-ically, we aim to investigate how rifting evolves under the Venusian surface conditionsand the proposed lithospheric structure. Our results show that a strong crustal rheol-ogy such as diabase is needed to localize strain and to develop a rift under the high sur-face temperature and pressure of Venus. The evolution of the rift formation is predom-inantly controlled by the crustal thickness, with a 25 km-thick diabase crust required toproduce mantle upwelling and melting. The surface topography produced by our mod-els fits well with the topography profiles of the Ganis and Devana Chasmata for differ-ent crustal thicknesses. We therefore speculate that the difference in these rift featureson Venus could be due to different crustal thicknesses. Based on the estimated heat fluxof Venus, our models indicate that a crust with a global average lower than 35 km is themost likely crustal thickness on Venus.