Future Venus Missions |
Future Venus Missions |
Jul 1 2005, 01:30 AM
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Solar System Cartographer Group: Members Posts: 10189 Joined: 5-April 05 From: Canada Member No.: 227 |
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 -------------------- ... because the Solar System ain't gonna map itself.
Also to be found posting similar content on https://mastodon.social/@PhilStooke Maps for download (free PD: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...Cartography.pdf NOTE: everything created by me which I post on UMSF is considered to be in the public domain (NOT CC, public domain) |
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Jan 5 2015, 07:44 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
In the past two years, some various news and non-news that seems relevant to Venus exploration (and non-exploration!):
Plans by Russia and India for future Venus missions have been pushed back or gone mute. But in the meantime, India and China have had successes with missions to the Moon and Mars, which has some bearing on the capability of the world's developing space programs to be able to explore Venus. Venus Express has done some great science from the orbital view looking down in IR/UV. Many of the major goals that remain, as described by VEXAG, focus on the lower atmosphere and surface. I think recent successes by India, China, and Japan show that some great Venus missions could be performed by these programs if they focused their attention there. In particular: 1) Sensitive in situ measurements of composition in the lower atmosphere: The best data we have came between 1978 and 1984, now over 30 years old. Huygens, using instruments of a vintage about half that age produced atmospheric composition measurements a few times more precise than we have for Venus. If that level of sensitivity could be improved upon for Venus, then calculations of isotope ratios would be highly improved from what we have now, and that would have a lot of bearing on our understanding of Venus's crustal/atmospheric evolution. That, in turn, has a bearing on understanding how Earth, Mars, and extrasolar terrestrial planets have evolved. 2) There has never been descent imaging performed at Venus. Even a probe lacking the ability to survive Venus's surface heat could return imagery from altitude that is vastly superior to the resolution of Magellan radar. A well-placed landing site could image two or more surface units as Huygens did on Titan, using existing maps to target the descent site(s), which could be chosen independently of the atmospheric goals. Two probes could potentially image four surface units from altitude. 2b) Older probes showed that short-term survival at the surface is not unattainable, so descent imagining could potentially turn into surface panoramas. 3) A radar mapper superior to Magellan is another worthy goal, and is yet another way to do great science without dealing with the surface heat. It's hard to operate on the surface of Venus, but it's not hard to cruise to Venus and descend into its atmosphere. So far, China and India have prioritized Mars ahead of Venus in their space exploration plans. I think their interests might be served better by staking out some territory that the more active space programs have ignored, and Venus is a pretty big swath of territory not so far away. |
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