[X] My Assistant

[Bubbinski]

Ah, I notice there's a bunch of new forums on this site. So I figure I might as well inaugurate at least one of them.

I see that the Europeans are going to launch a sister ship to Mars Express, only this one's going to Venus. I've checked out the ESA web site and it mentions that the probe will study the atmosphere of Venus as well as measure the surface temperatures. But the site didn't say much more, nor did I see a breakdown of what instruments the craft had. Is there going to be a radar on that spacecraft as well, to make follow up observations of targets Magellan caught? Or is there going to be a camera similar to Mars Express, only targeted toward the atmospheric clouds? And are there going to be any atmospheric or surface probes launched from the main craft, a la Beagle 2?

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

There is very serious consideration being given by the US to a mission -- not a wildly expensive one, either; it may be flyable within a Discovery Program budget -- to aerobrake a US orbiter into a low circular orbit around Venus sometime during the next decade and map it radarwise with really high resolution (maybe 30 meters or less), and with emphasis on obtaining 3-D topographical data. If Bruce Campbell's concept for a similar SAR mapper of Mars (rejected last time as a Mars Scout proposal) can be made to work, it could be extremely easily adapted for this mission.

The reason Venus Express doesn't include any such system is simply that it was selected precisely because the ESA saw an opportunity to fly a very low-cost science mission of some sort using a clone of Mars Express in 2005 and put out proposals as to possible scientific uses for such a craft, with this being the chosen one. Minimizing costs in this way, however, requires an absolute minimum of modification to the original Mars Express spacecraft and mission design. And even then, VEx actually got cancelled once and reinstated -- and it was reinstated, in a programmatic form that made it harder to cancel, just before the ESA discovered new budget problems that forced them to cancel their planned Eddington astronomy mission (a higher-priority mission scientifically) and certainly would have killed VEx instead had they been discovered just a few months earlier. In short, this is a very lucky mission.

[djellison]

If Bruce Campbell's concept for a similar SAR mapper of Mars (rejected last time as a Mars Scout proposal) can be made to work, it could be extremely easily adapted for this mission.

And then - in a backwards ESA move - I suppose a clone of the Venus vehicle could be flown to mars at a later date - or vice versa. Are Mars mission precluded from Discovery money?

Doug