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

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I see I forgot to provide the URL for the LPSC abstract on the use of LIBS on Venus. *sigh*

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/1338.pdf

[Guest_Myran_*]

....and without any need for instruments that require a long time to gather their data 

I think you are right, a Mössbauer spectrometer of the kind the MER rovers have will not do, whatever instruments a Venus lander will be provided with they need to work rather fast.
Perhaps the robotic arm should work by a simple cog and wheel system moving automatically from point to point and a simple contact that turns of the downward movement as soon it touch hard soil, just in the hope it will get to touch down on more that one kind of mineral and bedrock. Without computerized parts, you wont risk overheating and failure.

If one airconditioned lander survives the first 12 hours or whatever, it should have the ability to download new instructions, so this would indeed be a workable kind of lander.
But I have a hunch that the space agencies never will spend that much money to send any simpler lander that Phil Stooke suggests. When they spend that many millions for the launch and logistics, the administrators will upgrade the lander up to the point where the lander will be one other megabuck marvel in itself.

So that proposal of a really simple non computerized system and Phil Stooke's suggestion might not happen at all, yet I have a hunch that for one inhospitable place like Venus, the best way to go is by the 'keep it simple stupid' thinking.