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

[Paolo]

speaking of which, anyone has any "hard" information (papers, abstracts etc.) on the private Rocket Lab Venus mission? other than, I mean, the articles in online media saying that it is being studied with little or no real information...

beside, being old enough to remember private missions which never took off including ISELA, Lunacorp, NEAP, Red Dragon and many more I am not holding my breath for this one

[Mongo]

speaking of which, anyone has any "hard" information (papers, abstracts etc.) on the private Rocket Lab Venus mission? other than, I mean, the articles in online media saying that it is being studied with little or no real information...

beside, being old enough to remember private missions which never took off including ISELA, Lunacorp, NEAP, Red Dragon and many more I am not holding my breath for this one

Venus Life Finder Mission Study

The Venus Life Finder Missions are a series of focused astrobiology mission concepts to search for habitability, signs of life, and life itself in the Venus atmosphere. While people have speculated on life in the Venus clouds for decades, we are now able to act with cost-effective and highly-focused missions. A major motivation are unexplained atmospheric chemical anomalies, including the "mysterious UV-absorber", tens of ppm O2, SO2 and H2O vertical abundance profiles, the possible presence of PH3 and NH3, and the unknown composition of Mode 3 cloud particles. These anomalies, which have lingered for decades, might be tied to habitability and life's activities or be indicative of unknown chemistry itself worth exploring. Our proposed series of VLF missions aim to study Venus' cloud particles and to continue where the pioneering in situ probe missions from nearly four decades ago left off. The world is poised on the brink of a revolution in space science. Our goal is not to supplant any other efforts but to take advantage of an opportunity for high-risk, high-reward science, which stands to possibly answer one of the greatest scientific mysteries of all, and in the process pioneer a new model of private/public partnership in space exploration.

The paper talks about the VLF Rocket Lab mission in sections 2 and 3 (pages 15 to 23).

The rest of the paper is even more interesting, talking about the proposed privately funded Venus Life Finder Mission (sections 4 and 5, pages 24 to 33) and the later proposed Venus Atmosphere Sample Return Mission (sections 5 and 6, pages 42 to 52).