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

[RNeuhaus]

Why does not do design a good space architecture as the Mars ones with the initial support of MGS and Odyssey as the initial recoconizance support and as relay for the landed probes to Earth?

This architecture should be applied for the next mission to Venus and it would solve the communications problems to landed probes on Venus and also a better understanding of Venus in order to even assure the future missions to Venus. This mission be must taken with a gradual steps, perhaps, an lapse of 10 years.

Rodolfo