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_*]

This wouldn't make the SAGE landers that much slimmer -- take a look at the table of experiment weights and power requirements in the JPL paper.

One possibility that comes to mind, though, is scattering a bunch of probes around on Venus that don't have imagers of any type (in addition to some that do), in order to get purely compositional data from the surface at a number of places for comparison purposes (along, perhaps, with a penetrometer or densitometer on the sampling arm so that we could tell how hard the material was that they were sampling). The data transmission requirements would be so much lower for these that they could send all their data directly back to Earth, very greatly simplifying the mission. And in that case you really would get a much lighter overall spacecraft capable of carrying more landers.

I'm currently awaiting my copy of a document that will be put out in a week or two by a study team for VEXAG (the Venus Exploration Analysis Group, part of whose Pasadena meeting I caught on the way home from the COMPLEX meeting) listing the scientific priorities and technological difficulty of various Venusian surface measurements -- which should tell us a lot more about the proper way to explore this very difficult subject. But there seem to me, right now, to be two (maybe three) top-priority items for Venusian surface analysis (since seismometry is very hard and must be bumped well into the future).

The first is trying to determine where there are any rocks or minerals indicating that early Venus had oceans -- including felsic (granitic) rocks and possible aqueous minerals. And the only good places to look for that evidence seem to be the tesserae and Ishtar Terra (the only thing on Venus that looks somewhat like an Earthly continent). The second is trying to age-date different parts of Venus to see whether the "catastrophic resurfacing" theory is correct, which might be doable, at least loosely, with in-situ instruments. But Bruce Campbell thinks that age-dating may not be possible even for returned Venus samples due to their high temperature (although others disagree with him), and that a better way to solve this problem is with an orbiter with a deep subsurface radar sounder to look for lava-flow overlay patterns in different types of terrain -- just the sort of mission he's proposing for the next Discovery AO.

The third is to try and determine the nature of that mysterious highly radar-reflective stuff that turns up on Venus' high-altitude terrain, which a single lander with additional goals might be able to do without very complex instruments. In short, answering all the really important questions about Venus -- until we can develop that difficult long-lived lander technology at our leisure -- may not require all that many landers.