SPACE — Three major missions to Planet Venus have been long overdue. However, recently NASA has announced the postponement of one of its closest missions to the blazing morning star. In fact, bright Venus as a morning star as well as an evening star has rarely been touched by research robots in the last few decades.
Scientists believe the postponement of the first mission will affect the other two missions to explore our neighboring planet. At the end of 2022, NASA revised the VERITAS mission (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy), which was originally scheduled to fly in 2027, to at least 2031. In fact, VERITAS’ departure marked a decade of knowledge about Venus.
NASA’s 2024 budget proposal was announced in March 2023. NASA withheld funding for the VERITAS mission to just $1.5 million per year, putting the mission in a deep freeze. NASA decided to use a large portion of the budget to support the engineering operations of other mission projects facing cost overruns. Most of the work on the VERITAS mission has now come to a halt.
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The indefinite delay has disbanded the mission’s engineering wing, and scientists are now concerned about the impact on two other related missions to Venus. “VERITAS has great synergies with other missions,” Stephen Kane, an astronomer at the University of California at Riverside, told Space.com.
VERITAS is supposed to be the first mission back to Venus since NASA’s Magellan spacecraft orbited it nearly 30 years ago. “The spacecraft will contribute the basic measurements needed for all kinds of basic Venusian science,” Darby Dyar, VERITAS deputy principal investigator told Space.com
Some of those measurements, such as mapping the surface of Venus, are at least three times better than Magellan’s. It will support NASA’s other Venus mission, DAVINCI (Venusian Inner Atmosphere Investigations for Precious Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging).
Scheduled to reach Venus in the early 2030s, DAVINCI will drop a probe into the planet’s dense clouds on its way to the surface. The DAVINCI mission robot will be the second Earth object to touch the hellish surface of Venus.
According to the original plan, VERITAS will have arrived on Venus before the launch of DAVINCI. So scientists hope to use the data to select the best landing site for the DAVINCI mission. “The surface mapping provided by VERITAS will be very useful for fine-tuning the DAVINCI deployment,” said Kane.
Another mission originally intended to leverage VERITAS data is EnVision, which is led by the European Space Agency (ESA). The third mission is scheduled to launch in the early 2030s to study the climate on Venus. With a delay, EnVision will visit the planet Venus at the same time as VERITAS arrives, if that too survives NASA’s budget woes.
“These results are less than ideal when the EnVision team hoped to have VERITAS data,” said Paul Byrne, a professor of astronomy at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.
Parallel missions also require that identical or identical instruments required for both missions need to be built at the same time. For example, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is building the Venus Emissivity Mapper (VEM) for VERITAS and VenSpec-M for EnVision. The two instruments were intended to complement each other in surveying the planet’s surface, so DLR initially planned to build the VERITAS instrument first, and then EnVision.
“But with the current plans the DLR team would probably build two copies of the instrument suite simultaneously. That would put them under time and manpower pressure,” Byrne said.
Scientists also worry that having VERITAS and EnVision on Venus at the same time will make results less than ideal for at least some of the expected science. That includes a shorter than expected time to detect Venus volcanoes.
For example, the VEM and VenSpec-M mapping instruments on both missions will search for active lava flows on the surface of the planet Venus. The work will provide strong evidence that the planet is still volcanically active. Such a find would add to data about active volcanoes on Venus, which scientists discovered while sifting through 30 years of data collected by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft.
The discovery was made possible because two images taken eight months apart show the volcanic vent growing larger and also changing shape. Scientists suspect there was recent volcanic activity. Scientists hope to find similar changes with the upcoming mission, which is why the arrivals of VERITAS and EnVision were initially separate so that their data complemented each other.
“By delaying, we are reducing the separation between VERITAS and EnVision. This will provide a shorter date line for detection,” said Darby.
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The VERITAS engineering team is currently stopped working as directed by NASA. Meanwhile, the science team is still supported by a limited fund of US$1.5 million per year. They continue to prepare for the mission while looking for ways to move the launch date earlier than 2031. However, both teams are still languishing.
Baca All Facts about the Planet Venus
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