New Venus abstracts from two conferences Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

(1) Some more of the Powerpoint presentations from the Chapman Conference in February are now available: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/chapman_conf...ions/index.html . (Perhaps the most interesting item is still page 14 of http://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/chapman_conf...ns/mackwell.pdf , proposing that Magellan's temperature maps have found evidence of ongoing active volcanism in Devana Chasma.)

(2) The last of the available Chapman items, in turn, led me to the URL of a January Venus entry probe workshop by the ESA that I hadn't even been aware of ( http://www.aero.jussieu.fr/VEP/ ), which also contains some interesting stuff. Page 15 of the Balint presentation provides the name for Kevin Baines' new Discovery proposal, which I believe somebody was asking about earlier -- it's "VALOR" (Venus Atmospheric Long-duration Observatories for in-situ Research"), and apparently involves two separate cloud-level balloons instead of just the one mentioned by Baines before ( http://www.ims.demokritos.gr/IPPW-3/index_...20abstracts.pdf , pg. 73). Note that space acronyms are getting more tortured than ever; this one compares to Calvin's "GROSS" club ("Get Rid Of Slimy girlS").