#Venus_exploration

[phonemantra-blog]

Rocket Lab plans to launch a mission to Venus at the end of 2024, building on its experience from the previous lunar mission At the Venus Exploration Group (VEXAG) meeting, Rocket Lab chief systems engineer Christopher Mundy announced that the company has set a launch date for a mission to Venus called Venus Life Finder of December 30, 2024. The mission will send a small spacecraft to Venus. It is equipped with one instrument - an autofluorescent nephelometer, designed to detect organic compounds in the clouds of the planet. The mission proposed by scientists from MIT aims to search for biomarkers in the atmosphere of Venus. [caption id="attachment_78701" align="aligncenter" width="780"] mission to Venus[/caption] Rocket Lab is preparing to launch a mission to Venus to search for biomarkers in 2024 Rocket Lab is collaborating with MIT and other institutions on this privately funded mission. The launch was previously scheduled for May 2023, but the company postponed it while working on other priority projects. Mandy noted that the Venus mission is a side project that is being developed "in the evenings and weekends."  The company is currently in the process of preparing for the mission. Components such as the probe's thermal protection system from NASA Ames Research Center and the core instrument from Droplet Measurement Technologies are expected to arrive by the end of the year. The spacecraft will then be assembled and tested next year. The launch is scheduled for December 30, 2024. The 315-kilogram spacecraft will be launched into low-Earth orbit using an Electron rocket, followed by a series of orbit-raising maneuvers before heading to Venus for a flyby of the Moon. According to plans, the device will arrive at Venus on May 13, 2025. Once separated from the main body, the probe will collect data for five minutes as it descends through clouds in the upper atmosphere. It will then transmit the collected data for 20 minutes until the atmospheric pressure reaches its maximum level at 22 kilometers altitude, at which time the temperature inside the probe reaches the limit values ​​​​withstandable by the electronics. The mission is being developed using technical solutions used in the NASA-funded CAPSTONE mission launched on an Electron rocket in June 2022. Using existing designs can reduce engineering work and reduce costs. Rocket Lab has not disclosed the cost of this mission, but it is likely within the budget of NASA's smallest class of planetary science missions, SIMPLEx, which has a cap cost of $55 million.

[phonemantra-blog]

New work suggests active tectonics on ancient Venus and that the tectonic state of the planets may change over time A new study confirms that high levels of nitrogen and argon in Venus's atmosphere indicate emissions of gases during tectonic activity billions of years ago. This suggestion could mean that Venus may have been habitable for a long period before some event that changed its conditions. Scientists have long sought to understand why Venus's carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere is 90 times denser than Earth's and contains almost no water vapor, despite the planet's temperature being maintained at 462 degrees Celsius. However, there is a possibility that such conditions were not always like this. Previous studies modeling Venus's geological past have pointed to the possibility of a small ocean of liquid water and a habitable surface early in the first two billion years or so of the planet's early history. [caption id="attachment_77000" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Venus[/caption] Scientists from Brown University used the underlying data to compare Venus's current atmosphere with atmospheres created by a variety of models of long-term thermo-chemical-tectonic evolution. In other words, they tried to establish a correspondence between the current atmosphere of the planet and possible previous scenarios that take into account tectonic changes. “Venus’s existing atmosphere requires gases to be ejected early in its life due to activity similar to plate tectonics. Our results indicate that the atmosphere of Venus is the result of a climate-tectonic transition that lasted at least a billion years, and then transitioned to the current regime of a virtually stationary “stagnant mantle” with reduced rates of gas emissions,” the scientific team notes in their paper. . The concept of a “stagnant mantle” (Stagnant lid) means that the surface of the planet consists of a single plate with limited mobility and gas release into the atmosphere. The study of Venus has given rise to suggestions that planets can change their tectonic state and living conditions The researchers simulated the events that had to happen on the planet for it to reach the state it is in now. Scientists believe that Venus likely had active plate tectonics immediately after its formation, approximately 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. Based on the proposals in the paper, early tectonic movement, similar to that of the Earth, was limited by both the number of moving plates and the scale of their displacement. However, presumably, some events occurred on Venus that led to a stop in the tectonic movement of plates. Because this work has the potential to change our current understanding of planetary evolution, additional testing of the model's results is necessary. “Up until now, we thought that plate tectonics was in a 'binary state': it either exists or it doesn't. It either existed throughout the entire history of the planet or did not exist at all. In our work, we showed that planets can transition between different states of tectonics. "In addition, the results also indicate that there may be planets transitioning between habitable states and not just viable ones," said study co-author Alexander Evans, assistant professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University. In addition, this work points to the possibility of several ways to interpret the history of the planet. “At the moment, we still adhere to the paradigm where we study their surfaces to understand the history of planets. But we have demonstrated that the atmosphere may be the best tool for understanding the ancient history of planets, which is often not preserved on their surface,” Evans said. Future missions to Venus will help refine the data from this study. NASA's DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry and Imaging) mission will provide measurements of gases in the atmosphere of Venus. In turn, the European Space Agency's EnVision probe will probe the planet's dense atmosphere from orbit using high-resolution radar. DAVINCI is scheduled to launch in 2029 and EnVision between 2035 and 2039.