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_*]

Well, it's a fact that E.E. Barnard -- one of the sharpest-eyed of all astronomers (which is how he discovered Amalthea) -- is also the only naked-eye astronomer to swear that he saw Mars covered with craters.

[ljk4-1]

Well, it's a fact that E.E. Barnard -- one of the sharpest-eyed of all astronomers (which is how he discovered Amalthea) -- is also the only naked-eye astronomer to swear that he saw Mars covered with craters.

There was an article in Sky & Telescope magazine (exact issue I do not recall,
but likely within the last 10 years) that claims the craters he saw were actually
the Tharsis volcanoes.

But why were scientists so surprised when Mariner 4 found so many craters
on Mars? Did they really expect the planet to have more erosion mechanisms?