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NASA Targets Venus, Asteroids With Potential Missions
coondoggie writes: NASA this week picked five possible contenders for a relatively low-cost robotic mission to space. The five candidates from a batch of 27 –include Venus, near-Earth object and asteroid operations – will ultimately be whittled down to one or two that will cost approximately $500 million, not including launch vehicle or post-launch operations, NASA stated. The DAVINCI probe would "study the chemical composition of Venus' atmosphere during a 63-minute descent. It would answer scientific questions that have been considered high priorities for many years, such as whether there are volcanoes active today on the surface of Venus and how the surface interacts with the atmosphere of the planet." A longer-range spacecraft called Lucy would "perform the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, objects thought to hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system."
miss a lot of interesting rocks that way.
PASA surprassed this last week by proposing a mamission to the sun. They're going at night.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
The one mission I think could be really excellent would be an atmospheric probe of Venus that could float around the upper atmosphere where it is at a pressure nearly equivalent to earth. So far most probes haven't lasted very long, so it would be an engineering challenge with the potential to send back some really amazing images from the cloud layer. And forget mars, venus is the most promising place in the Solar System for its terraforming and habitability potential, *all you need to do* is remove enough Carbon from the atmosphere and you end up with plenty of oxygen. An airship could explore, take samples and test a CO2 converter. Heck just throw a plant on there and see if you can keep it alive.
To see how dirty it is. Or maybe just for a "feel good" mission.
https://xkcd.com/1456/ (title text)
While the surface is hell, I remember reading somewhere that the upper atmosphere of Venus is actually quite balmy. With its thick atmosphere, Venus would be the perfect place to launch an airship or other lighter than air vehicle. Maybe it can support not just balloons but even a floating "air" station that seems like the better alternative to a Martian space colony.
Wow, the moderators here are so CONservative. So CONservative.
It is disgusting to support taking money from working families to give to corporation. I guess you sleep at night by lying to yourselves by calling those corporations people.
"Jupiter trojan asteroids"???
Wait, you mean the formerly-known-as-a-planet "Jupiter" has failed to clear its orbit?
Quick, someone let the IAU know! This error in nomenclature simply cannot stand!
You are an idiot
Including landers, returning pics from the surface. http://mentallandscape.com/V_V...
Ydco co
WIC provides $41.44 per month for food for infants. For the cost of this Republcian scam, we could afford to provide 120,000,000 additional infant-months of food with WIC. Republicans are literally starving babies to do this.
Republicans care more about technology than people. Republicans are not whole people.
This post is very useful for the scientists are research and scholars
Govt Jobs
You're math is wrong. They're only starving 12 million babies rather than 120 million.
such as whether there are volcanoes active today on the surface of Venus
A non-question. Venus is much more volcanically active than earth. It is covered with volcanoes and lava flows. We have seen their morphological and thermal signatures by the thousands. Move on, for goodness sake. Say you want to explore Venusian volcanoes. Like the recent "discovery" of H2O seeps on Mars. Nothing new. They were noticed 16 years ago!. The recent results just added to the evidence.
My god, what an evil person you are. Spending time typing on a computer while babies are starving to death? Paying for internet access when that money could do so much. If you actually believed what you wrote, you would have sold your computer and everything you don't need to survive, and spent every waking moment to raise money to feed the starving.
The defense budget is $53 billion dollars a month. That's enough for 1,281,000,000 babies. If you are thinking of trimming the NASA budget instead of the Defense budget, your priorities are completely fucked up.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The FBI should be alerted. We need perp walks!