Future Venus Missions |
Future Venus Missions |
Jul 1 2005, 01:30 AM
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#301
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Solar System Cartographer Group: Members Posts: 10226 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 PDF: 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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Jun 12 2021, 01:40 PM
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#302
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2106 Joined: 13-February 10 From: Ontario Member No.: 5221 |
No, it's still happening. Not a paper (since it's a private mission), but there is a recent interview with Peter Beck here with a few more details (at 5:20 he mentions ~200 seconds in the atmosphere with a tunable laser spectrometer).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7iVs0Cq84M |
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Jun 12 2021, 05:04 PM
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#303
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
This round of missions will return most of its data in the timeframe of 2029-2034. Then the scientific priorities should define what comes next.
A long-life seismic station (or network) will certainly be a priority if and when it's feasible. In other respects, it's frankly hard to say what missions will make sense in the 2040s until we have results back from the three missions that were just approved. A potential line of exploration will depend on whether or not the tesserae contain ancient surface from a distinct earlier epoch when Venus was fundamentally a different planet. That's what Curiosity and Perseverance are doing at Mars. But you can't plan that until you know that it's even there to explore. Maybe all the tesserae contain such terrain. Maybe 1% of them do and we have to hunt for that 1%. Maybe 0% do and it's just chaotic, broken-up versions of what is in the plains. Maybe spectroscopy helps us identify such terrain and maybe it doesn't. Maybe we would want to have an airplane below the clouds map visible+IR spectrometry during the daytime or IR emissivity at night. Roughly speaking, this is like the state of Mars exploration in 1992. Nobody then could have known that twelve years later we'd be examining the layers of sedimentary rock on Mars. But for us to do that, the planet has to have sedimentary rock, and Venus is still an enigma. |
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