Future Venus Missions Options

[Phil Stooke]

Oh well, might as well start that new topic since it's already well advanced in the Juno area...

My perspective on landers is as follows. All the landers we've had so far were dropped blind onto an essentially unknown surface. Any future landers can be targeted for specific terrains. It really is not true that we have had representative landings. Even a descent image or two, a panoramic photo plus a bit of surface composition, from a simple Venera-class lander just updated a bit, would be useful if we could put several down at well chosen targets. My choices would be:

Examples of the main plains units (smooth, fractured, ridged)

tesserae

high elevation radar-bright tesserae

large fresh lava flow unit ('fluctus')

crater dark parabola

crater ejecta outflow unit

dunes area.

And I have always assumed, rightly or wrongly, that it would be relatively easy to put these down, so they ought to be fairly inexpensive as planetary landers go.

Phil

[Juramike]

The Venera landers did manage last about an hour on the surface.

I like to think that with all the improvements in instrumentation technology (and better luck), that a next generation lander could do great science even with only an hour of lifetime.

-Mike

[vjkane]

The Venera landers did manage last about an hour on the surface. I like to think that with all the improvements in instrumentation technology (and better luck), that a next generation lander could do great science even with only an hour of lifetime.

The current lander plans seem to be counting on about an hour or two, so not much improvement there. However, there are a couple of ways of getting more science. First, you could grab samples, inflate a balloon, and do the analysis in the cool clouds. That is the official Venus lander goal for the New Frontiers Venus mission and I believe for the proposed Venus Flagship mission. However, it's recognized that that approach is expensive, so simply short lived landers are an acceptable alternative and were proposed for the first New Frontiers competition and are rumored to be proposed for the upcoming competition.

The other possibility is to use remote laser sensing (both a la MSL and Raman) to target multiple features at the landing site without the difficult problems of bringing samples inside the craft. My hope is that a periscope could sit atop the lander. An on board camera would analyze images of the site, identify a variety of targets, and target the laser accordingly.

I just posted a long discussion of possible New Frontiers Venus missions at http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/ that discusses these options and has links to proposed mission descriptions.