High-Temp Electronics For Venus Exploration, recent advances Options

[JRehling]

The topic is a bit timely, with Mars Insight launching soon: a low-bandwidth lander with a conventional camera, conventional laser spectrometer, and conventional mass spectrometer plus high-temperature electronics supporting a seismometer could be a heck of a mission. The first three instruments would work for an hour and give us observations upon arrival, while the seismometer would work for months, at least. I suspect that Venus has enough quakes that a few months would be very informative. It'd be really nice to drop two of these at different latitudes of the same longitude and locate the epicenter of the quakes.

[Gerald]

In order to investigate possible ongoing volcanism, I'd presume, that one would be interested in longer-lasting atmospheric spectrometry.

[JRehling]

Long-term monitoring of atmospheric composition would certainly be interesting and perhaps the instrument and its logic could be done with high temperature electronics. It's an open question as to how long an interval would be likely to detect changes, which has been done from orbit, revealing roughly one spike in SO2 per decade. Perhaps smaller spikes are more frequent.