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_*]

To my delight, last night I stumbled by chance across something I've been looking for all year -- the new address for JPL's file of Technical Reports ( http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/ ). And the very first article I found there was something I've been trying to find for a couple of years: the first good description of Larry Esposito's "SAGE" Venus lander proposal for the last New Frontiers AO ( http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstre...4/1/03-2520.pdf ).

While it didn't make the cut for finalist, it looks like quite a well-designed mission, featuring two landers that would touch down about 1000 km apart -- one on the tessera at Aphrodite, the other on the regular basalt plains to the south -- and survive for 1-2 hours each on the surface, consecutively transmitting their data to the carrier spacecraft while it made a distant flyby of Venus. The landing system is very much like that for the Veneras. There were seven onboard experiments -- including three atmospheric ones, but not including any attempt to track Venus' cloud-layer winds with a balloon (one originally stated goal for the New Frontiers Venus mission). A drill would collect a sample for X-ray spectrometry and diffractometry -- which makes me wonder whether the size and cost of this mission could be lowered by instead using a LIBS/Raman setup for surface analysis, thus allowing removal of the heavy drill and airlock setup. (It's stated that if it ever became possible to add a third lander, it would be aimed at a "hot spot", by which they presumably mean one of the relatively young volcanic highlands.)

One thing is noted which I should have thought of before but didn't: thanks to Venus' slow rotation, any direct-entry lander mission launched during a specific launch window is very limited in its scientific selection of landing sites as compared to a Mars direct-entry lander.