{"id":11630,"date":"2021-06-08T01:13:59","date_gmt":"2021-06-07T17:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasa-selects-two-robotic-missions-to-venus-for-launch-in-late-2020s\/"},"modified":"2021-06-08T01:13:59","modified_gmt":"2021-06-07T17:13:59","slug":"nasa-selects-two-robotic-missions-to-venus-for-launch-in-late-2020s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasa-selects-two-robotic-missions-to-venus-for-launch-in-late-2020s\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA selects two robotic missions to Venus for launch in late 2020s"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
The northern hemisphere is displayed in this global view of the surface of Venus as seen by NASA Magellan spacecraft. Credit: NASA\/JPL<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA has selected two robotic missions for launch to Venus around 2029, the U.S. space agency\u2019s first spacecraft in more than 30 years dedicated to exploring the hellishly hot second planet from the sun.<\/p>\n

The two winning proposals \u2014 named DAVINCI+ and VERITAS \u2014 won a competition run by NASA to select the next projects for development under the agency\u2019s Discovery program, a line of cost-capped planetary science missions.<\/p>\n

\u201cCongratulations to the teams behind NASA\u2019s two planetary science missions: VERITAS \u2014 \u201ctruth\u201d \u2014 and DAVINCI+,\u201d said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in the June 2 announcement. \u201cThese two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface. They will offer the entire science community the chance to investigate a planet we haven\u2019t been to in more than 30 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s last mission devoted to observing Venus was Magellan, which launched on a space shuttle in 1989 and arrived in orbit around the planet in 1990. Megallan mapped Venus\u2019s surface using radar waves, which can pierce the planet\u2019s thick clouds, to reveal the planet\u2019s mountains and topography.<\/p>\n

Since Magellan, several NASA spacecraft has sailed by Venus on the way to other planetary destinations, and Europe and Japan have sent orbiters to Venus.<\/p>\n

Nelson said further study of Venus, sometimes called Earth\u2019s twin, will help scientists understand how Earth and Venus diverged in their evolution throughout the solar system\u2019s 4.5-billion-year history.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our solar system, of the rocky planets, there\u2019s Mercury, the closest to the sun. It has no atmosphere,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cThen there\u2019s Venus with an incredibly dense atmosphere, then there\u2019s Earth with a habitable atmosphere, and then there\u2019s Mars with an atmosphere that is just 1% of Earth\u2019s. We hope the missions will further our understanding of how Earth evolved, and why it\u2019s currently habitable when others in our solar system are not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using a more sensitive radar instrument, VERITAS will update the topographic maps created by NASA\u2019s Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s, potentially revealing whether geologic processes such as volcanoes are currently active on the planet.<\/p>\n

DAVINCI+ will send a small probe, measuring roughly 3 feet (1 meter) across, into the thick atmosphere of Venus. The instrumented craft will plunge into Venus\u2019s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, deploy a parachute, and descend through cloud layers made of sulfuric acid before eventually landing on the surface.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re revving up our planetary science program with intense exploration of a world that NASA hasn\u2019t visited in over 30 years,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science. \u201cUsing cutting-edge technologies that NASA has developed and refined over many years of missions and technology programs, we\u2019re ushering in a new decade of Venus to understand how an Earth-like planet can become a hothouse.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goals are profound,\u201d Zurbuchen said in a statement. \u201cIt is not just understanding the evolution of planets and habitability in our own solar system, but extending beyond these boundaries to exoplanets, an exciting and emerging area of research for NASA.\u201d<\/p>\n

VERITAS stands for the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission. The development of VERITAS will be led at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.<\/p>\n

The DAVINCI+ mission, which stands for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging \u2013 Plus, will be managed at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.<\/p>\n

NASA said the missions will launch in the 2028-2030 timeframe. Each mission will get approximately $500 million for development, excluding launch costs and international contributions.<\/p>\n

In interviews with Spaceflight Now, the lead scientists for the VERITAS and DAVINCI+ missions said NASA has directed the teams to target launches in 2029, a schedule driven by budget availability.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve waited a long time for a U.S. mission to go back through the atmosphere of Venus, and we\u2019re delighted to be that mission,\u201d said Jim Garvin, chief scientist at Goddard and principal investigator for the DAVINCI+ mission. \u201cSo thanks to all fo the women and men that got us here. We can\u2019t wait to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just so thrilled to have this opportunity to go to Venus,\u201d said Sue Smrekar, principal investigator for the VERITAS mission at JPL. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s a lifelong dream. For many, it\u2019s been a labor of love for a year, five years, 10 years. Many have been working on it for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA selected the VERITAS and DAVINCI+ missions over two other finalists.<\/p>\n

One of the candidates, the Io Volcano Observer, would have sent a spacecraft to orbit Jupiter and pass near the moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The Trident mission proposal would have dispatched a probe to fly by Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, which harbors geyser-like plumes erupting from its icy surface.<\/p>\n

But Venus, which NASA has bypassed in several recent mission selections, won support this time.<\/p>\n

Data from DAVINCI+ will help scientists understand how the atmosphere of Venus formed and evolved, and help determine whether the planet \u2014 about the same size as Earth \u2014 ever had an ocean.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe science is simple,\u201d Garvin told Spaceflight Now. \u201cVenus has a massive atmosphere. It\u2019s layered, or stratified, and it records the history of billions of years of planetary evolution, which for Venus is still a mystery. It\u2019s an enigmatic rocky planet with a big atmosphere. We think Venus likely harbored global oceans for billions of years. That\u2019s the best modeling that we can get from what little we know.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Earth and Venus may have been similar billions of years ago, Venus\u2019s super-dense atmosphere is now 90 times thicker than Earth\u2019s. The sweltering blanket of carbon dioxide turns up the temperature at the surface to 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius).<\/p>\n

\u201cSo what happened? What happened to the climate change? How does that couple through the crust and rocks? What does that do the clouds, which are thick and fascinating, and how does that work?\u201d Garvin said.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Artist\u2019s illustration of NASA\u2019s DAVINCI+ mission at Venus, showing the atmospheric entry probe descending through Venus\u2019s clouds to the surface. Credit: NASA\/GSFC visualization and CI Labs Michael Lentz and colleagues<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to measure the history of water, other critical chemistries of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, their cycles, from the top of the atmosphere to the surface,\u201d Garvin said. \u201cWe\u2019re going re-measure the critical state of the lower atmosphere, temperature and pressure. It\u2019s super critical, so it\u2019s not a true gas, or an ideal gas. We\u2019ll measure that.\u201d<\/p>\n

DAVINCI+ was designed and proposed before scientists announced last year evidence of phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus, an indicator of possible life. Phosphine, made by combining a phosphorus atom with three hydrogen atoms, is only generated on Earth from microbes and industrial activity.<\/p>\n

But some researchers have voiced doubts about the phosphine discovery. DAVINCI+ will be outfitted to make direct measurements of phosphine, if it is there.<\/p>\n

The descent probe will be a titanium sphere housing a mass spectrometer and a tunable laser spectrometer to measure the composition of the atmosphere from top to bottom. The craft will also have instruments to measure pressures, temperatures, winds, and accelerations during descent, and a near-infrared camera system peering out the bottom of the probe will take pictures of the surface of Venus.<\/p>\n

\u201cBelow the clouds, we\u2019ll use a very high resolution new kind of descent imaging system that will not only take pictures but it will make images from which we can infer composition and topography,\u201d Garvin said. \u201cSo we\u2019re going to that all the way down from something like 90,000 feet (27.4 kilometers) to the surface, ever getting closer, and finally we\u2019ll be taking images with resolution like if you were flying a drone over your backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

The probe will be suspended under a parachute as it falls through Venus\u2019s atmosphere. The entire descent will take about an hour, targeting an area of Venus called Alpha Regio, a mountainous region first discovered in the 1960s using Earth-based radar observations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to go into those mountains,\u201d Garvin said. \u201cThey\u2019ve never been seen at human scales. We\u2019ll be seeing them, measuring them, and measuring the chemistry of the atmosphere above them. So all that will give us a storybook, an evolutionary history of Venus, and we\u2019ll apply that forward across the solar system, but also to exoplanets (planets around other stars) we\u2019ll be able to measure with the James Webb Space Telescope.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last U.S.-led mission to send a probe into the atmosphere of Venus was Pioneer Venus in 1978. The Soviet Union\u2019s Vega missions were the last to plunge deep into Venus\u2019s atmosphere in 1985.<\/p>\n

The descent probe itself will be built in-house at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, while Lockheed Martin will supply the aeroshell, heat shield, and a carrier spacecraft to ferry the entry vehicle from Earth to Venus, according to Garvin.<\/p>\n

The carrier spacecraft will relay data from the DAVINCI+ descent probe back to Earth. The carrier will not enter orbit around Venus, but will fly by the planet on a trajectory to provide about an hour of solid communications with the entry vehicle.<\/p>\n

If the descent probe safely reaches the surface, the mission could return some bonus data. But scientists have not committed to that as part of the DAVINCI+ primary mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get our own big radio communication system right there at Venus on a trajectory that gives us really favorable communications, a nice long arc that lasts up to an hour or so,\u201d Garvin said. \u201cIn fact, if it survives surface impact, which we don\u2019t know \u2026 we could potentially communicate for another 10 or 15 minutes because we would have the comm link. We don\u2019t know if that will be possible, and it\u2019s not part of our mission, but \u2026 we might have that opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe spacecraft is thermally conditioned to operate for about an hour-and-a-half,\u201d Garvin said. \u201cOnce it\u2019s down in that hot environment, (the conditions) will eventually get to the point that the electronics of our primary four instruments will not be functional.\u201d<\/p>\n

The DAVINCI+ carrier spacecraft will have its own science instruments, including a suite of ultraviolet and near-infrared cameras to track cloud motion and measure thermal emissions from the surface.<\/p>\n

A technology demonstration package on DAVINCI+ will test the Compact Ultraviolet to Visible Spectrometer, or CUVIS, instrument to study an unknown ultraviolet absorber in Venus\u2019s atmosphere that absorbs up to half the incoming solar energy, NASA said.<\/p>\n

According to Garvin, assuming DAVINCI+ launches in 2029, the mission will perform two flybys of Venus in 2030 before the returning to the planet in 2031 to release the descent probe.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Artist\u2019s concept of the VERITAS spacecraft. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The other Venus mission, VERITAS, will carry a synthetic aperture radar instrument on an orbiting spacecraft to survey the planet\u2019s surface over nearly the entire planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goal is to really understand the geologic evolution of Venus, why it\u2019s different from the Earth, and try to understand why Venus never developed plate tectonics,\u201d said Smrekar, the lead scientist on the VERITAS mission. \u201cHow has that affected the evolution of its climate?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re looking at the volcanic history trying to understand whether its craters were wiped out by catastrophic volcanism, or whether, or not there\u2019s steady, perhaps even Earth-like quantities of volcanism happening today,\u201d Smrekar said in an interview. \u201cSo we have a lot of different science investigations to follow up on, but our overall goal is to understand the big picture evolution of Venus, and why it\u2019s so different from its twin planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

The VERITAS spacecraft will carry two instruments to Venus.<\/p>\n

The primary payload is an X-band synthetic aperture radar to greatly improve the 3D topographic maps produced by the Magellan mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt <\/span>will create global maps of the surface, a topography map, that has 100 times the resolution of Magellan,\u201d Smrekar said.<\/p>\n

The radar on VERITAS will produce data with a vertical accuracy of about 16 feet, or 5 meters, and a horizontal resolution of about 100 feet, or 30 meters, on a global scale. About 25% of the surface of Venus will be mapped at about 50-foot, or 15-meter, resolution, according to Smrekar.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also do repeat passage interferometry, which will be our first for any planet beyond the Earth,\u201d she said. \u201cWe basically take radar images separated by about seven months, and then look for deformation between the images.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could see volcanic deformations, such as a caldera inflating or deflating,\u201d she said. \u201cWe could see faulting deformation. There are suggestions that the rifting features on Venus could be active, so we\u2019ll be looking for deformation in those kinds of areas. And from (ESA\u2019s) Venus Express, we got hints of recent volcanism as well, so we\u2019ll check out those areas.\u201d<\/p>\n

A spectrometer on the VERITAS spacecraft will peer through clouds and measure the composition of Venus\u2019s surface. The spectrometer will be tuned to detect iron, among other elements.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we\u2019ll be able to do things like assess the theory, the hypothesis, that Venus has continent-like features,\u201d Smrekar said. \u201cIt has these big high plateaus that are highly deformed and are believed to be low in iron content. If that hypothesis is correct, they\u2019re basically fingerprints of past water because on the Earth, when continents form, it\u2019s basically massive quantities of basalt melting in the presence of water. So they may be basically remnants from Venus\u2019s wetter past.\u201d<\/p>\n

VERITAS will also look for thermal and chemical signatures of recent volcanic eruptions, and search for water that could be spewed out of Venus\u2019s interior through volcanoes. If there\u2019s evidence of that, it would indicate there must be significant amounts of water in the interior of Venus.<\/p>\n

The mission will also help refine estimates of the size of Venus\u2019s core, Smrekar said.<\/p>\n

She said the VERITAS and DAVINCI+ missions, while developed by separate teams, are \u201cvery complementary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cVERITAS provides the global mapping and context for any of the near-surface measurements that DAVINCI+ will make,\u201d Smrekar said. \u201cThey will take imaging data as they descend below the cloud deck, so to have those images of areas that we have radar data for will be great ground truth for the radar. We can also provide to them targeting for the most exciting scientific targets.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spacecraft bus for VERITAS will be manufactured by Lockheed Martin.<\/p>\n

The mission\u2019s radar will be developed by JPL in partnership with ASI, the Italian space agency. Italy will also provide the mission\u2019s high-gain antenna.<\/p>\n

DLR, the German space agency, is providing the infrared spectrometer for the VERITAS mission, and will assist in radar data processing. The French space agency, CNES, will provide components for the spacecraft\u2019s Ka-band communications system, Smrekar said.<\/p>\n

VERITAS will also carry a deep space atomic clock built by JPL as a technology experiment. The atomic clock will help enable autonomous spacecraft maneuvers and enhance radio science observations to study the interior of Venus, NASA said.<\/p>\n

Smrekar said the VERITAS mission will take about four months to travel from Earth and enter orbit around Venus.<\/p>\n

DAVINCI+ and VERITAS join the successful \u201cDiscovery\u201d line of NASA interplanetary missions.<\/p>\n

Previous Discovery-class missions included the Dawn spacecraft, which orbited two of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, the Messenger mission to Mercury, and the InSight lander currently listening for seismic activity on Mars. Two Discovery missions selected in 2017 \u2014 named Lucy and Psyche \u2014 are scheduled for launch in 2021 and 2022 to begin missions focused on asteroid exploration.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,\u201d said Tom Wagner, NASA\u2019s Discovery program scientist. \u201cIt will be as if we have rediscovered the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The northern hemisphere is displayed in this global view of the surface of Venus as seen by NASA Magellan spacecraft. Credit: NASA\/JPL NASA has selected two robotic missions for launch to Venus around 2029, the U.S. space agency\u2019s first spacecraft in more than 30 years dedicated to exploring the hellishly hot second planet from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11630"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11630\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}