NASA's VERITAS project delays are a serious setback for Venus exploration.
The two
other missions planned to investigate our planetary neighbour may be impacted
by delays to the first of three missions making the long-awaited return to the
scorching planet Venus, which experts say has not received enough robotic
visitors in recent decades.
NASA pushed
back the launch date of its VERITAS mission, which stands for Venus Emissivity,
Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy, from 2027 to no sooner than
2031. However, the mission financing for VERITAS is currently frozen at just
$1.5 million per year under the White House's 2024 NASA budget proposal, which
was unveiled in March 2023. Much of the work on the VERITAS mission has come to
a halt as a result of NASA's decision to divert the majority of the money that
supported the project's engineering operations to other missions that were
experiencing cost overruns. The engineering section of the mission has been
disbanded due to its indefinite delay, and scientists are now concerned about
its effects on two other journeys to Venus that are connected to it.
According to
Stephen Kane, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside,
"VERITAS has incredible synergy with the other missions."
Since NASA's
Magellan spaceship first orbited Venus nearly 30 years ago, VERITAS was
intended to be the first mission to visit Venus again. According to VERITAS
deputy principal investigator Darby Dyar, the spacecraft "will contribute
foundational measurements needed for all types of Venus fundamental
science."
A second
NASA Venus mission called DAVINCI was meant to benefit from some of those
observations, such as mapping Venus' surface with at least three times the
resolution of Magellan.
The DAVINCI
spacecraft will arrive at Venus in the early 2030s and lower a probe into the
planet's dense atmosphere so that it can travel to the planet's surface.
Scientists hoped to use VERITAS' data to choose the best landing site for
DAVINCI's probe because, according to the initial plan, it would have already
reached Venus before DAVINCI's launch.
EnVision, a
mission headed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and planned to launch in the
early 2030s to study Venus' climate, is another mission that was initially
meant to benefit from VERITAS data. If it makes it past NASA's funding
problems, EnVision is now planned to tour the planet around the same time that
the delayed VERITAS will arrive.
When the
EnVision team hoped to have the VERITAS data already in hand, this result is
"less than ideal," according to Paul Byrne, an astronomy professor at
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
The
simultaneous missions also require the construction of identical instruments
for both trips. For instance, the Venus Emissivity Mapper (VEM) for VERITAS and
VenSpec-M for EnVision are being constructed by the German Aerospace Center (or
DLR). DLR originally intended to build VERITAS' instrument first, and then
those for EnVision, as both instruments were meant to work in tandem to survey
the planet's surface.
Byrne added
that under the present plan, the DLR team "might be building two copies of
the instrument suite at the same time." "That will put them under
pressure with regard to time and the workforce."
The
simultaneous presence of VERITAS and EnVision on Venus is also causing concern
among scientists, who fear that this will lead to less than ideal results for
at least some of the anticipated science, including now having shorter than
ideal timelines for finding Venusian volcanoes.
In order to
find out whether the planet is still volcanically active, the VEM and VenSpec-M
mapping tools on both missions will scan the surface of the planet for any
active lava flows. These discoveries will complement the recent identification
of an active volcano on Venus, which was made after a thorough analysis of
30-year-old data gathered by NASA's Magellan probe.
The finding
was made possible by the observation that a volcanic vent had changed in size
and shape, indicating recent volcanic activity, in two images taken eight
months apart. Future missions are expected to detect similar changes, which is
why the arrivals of VERITAS and EnVision were originally spaced apart so that
their data would complement one another.
We narrow
the gap between VERITAS and EnVision by waiting. Darby spoke with Space.com. A
shorter timeframe for detections will result from this.
While the
science team at VERITAS is currently preparing for the mission while looking
into methods to advance the launch date from 2031, the engineering team is
currently standing down as instructed by NASA. The science team is supported by
a small budget of $1.5 million annually.
Reference:
space.com
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