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

[JRehling]

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

An orbiter for COM abilities would not have as much value for a world where landed missions only last two hours. In fact, an orbiter would be almost pointless, because it would only get to fly over the landing site once or twice while the lander was alive! You may as well land the COM package on the lander and send the high-gain telemetry straight to Earth instead of having it spend 90% of the lander's mission out of line of sight with the instruments on the surface.

[RNeuhaus]

An orbiter for COM abilities would not have as much value for a world where landed missions only last two hours. In fact, an orbiter would be almost pointless, because it would only get to fly over the landing site once or twice while the lander was alive! You may as well land the COM package on the lander and send the high-gain telemetry straight to Earth instead of having it spend 90% of the lander's mission out of line of sight with the instruments on the surface.

Let me see the architecture space design. As Venus rotates more than one year Earth. So the desired landing site can be programmed with anticipation according to the Earth's departure. So the lander will stay *almost on the same place facing to the Earth* for a long time so its HGA would be useful without much worries about pointing to Earth. So it is reasonably understandable that the COM orbiter is pointless unless a special or restrict conditions such as to land on the Sun's face.

Now, I am not very convinced that with our actual technology can permit to last the instruments less than 2 hours in Venus. It might be due to the economics factors. The cheaper ones will last less time than ones with more robust and expensive equipement incorporated with any kind of thermal refrigeration (LOX, LH, RTG, others).

Up to know, I don't still see a clear objective for the next mission to Venus. Indeed, it is still to early or not. The depending upon to the mission objective, It will be the factor influence for the right space architecture design. One group support for a ballute, others support for a landing of multiple probes. Any of them are useful but they bring the results for different objectives.

Rodolfo