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

[qraal]

Hi Guys

Geoff Landis discusses aerobots and surface rovers in some detail. New Silicon carbide electronics can operate at 500 C for hundreds of hours, so they'd be ideal for the rover...

Landis Paper for NASA

VEXAG presentation from 2008

...such a mission would stretch the state-of-the-art, which is a worthwhile goal for NASA. Would also allow design of deep-probes for the gas-giants! Down to the 200 bar level on Jupiter, 300 on Saturn and 800 bar on Uranus/Neptune.

[MahFL]

The Landis paper is really interesting, I did not realise electronics could operate reliably at 500 C.