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."

Comments

balloon probe of venus

[bigpat]

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.

Re:balloon probe of venus

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating habitable space on Venus would be fairly easy. As you say, the upper atmosphere isn't that bad, so all you need is a balloon, and fortunately a breathable atmosphere doubles as a lifting gas when set among the denser CO2 of the atmosphere outside. You can live among the support structures of your mega-zeppelin.

Terraforming is a much bleaker prospect though.

The heat is bad. If you were somehow able to stop all incoming sunlight, completely shut down the radioactive decay feeding Venus' core heat, and remove the atmosphere entirely for maximum radiative cooling, it'd still take about a hundred years for the surface to cool to habitable levels. There's a lot of heat sitting around in the crust.

The rotation is a worse problem. A Venus day is more than 200 times longer than an Earth day. If you set up an Earthlike climate, it would very quickly stop being Earthlike, as one side boiled and the other froze. You need a very thick atmosphere and strong winds to transport heat evenly. We'd have to resort to some kind of mega-engineering to simulate a day cycle (collossal orbiting mirrors maybe?) because spinning up the entire planet would need magic technology that we can't even imagine.

Re:balloon probe of venus

[Anonymous Coward]

Venus could be the most Earthlike planet from size and gravity perspective, but it would also be the most difficult to terraform. As you noted you would have to remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and somehow neutralize the less pleasant compounds. Then there is the problem with the fact that it is tidally locked to the sun so one side always faces the sun (or at least it rotates very slowly). So you would either have to somehow engineer the environment to help equalize the temperature between the sides, put a massive solar reflector in orbit to redirect some of the sunlight to the dark side, or live along the border between night/day sides in perpetual gale force windstorm. Mars on the other hand is fairly simple, build/inflate a dome, suck in some outside air, add some plants, add some nitrogen and you've got yourself a habitat and most of the resources you need a short drive away in your rover. A better option for Venus would probably be to try to remove the toxins from the atmosphere, remove a little of the CO2 to try to make the surface a little less hostile, and utilize floating habitats which would move with the atmosphere which circle the planet every 4 days or so. But even that would require far more effort than a Martian habitat.

Re:balloon probe of venus

[dargaud]

Deploy a monomolecular sheet (mylar, aluminium, whatever) at L1 between the sun and Venus over 200km diameter, lower the solar output, see if you can get the atmosphere to cool down and condensate.

Re:balloon probe of venus

[Tablizer]

*all you need to do* is remove enough Carbon from the atmosphere...

We are having trouble removing it from Earth's, and we have far less.

Re:balloon probe of venus

[Tablizer]

If we use the progressive-domino-slingshot effect, perhaps we can smash a big icy asteroid into Venus at a angle that gives it a faster rotation, and knocks the carbon out of the atmosphere.

Re:balloon probe of venus

[bigpat]

*all you need to do* is remove enough Carbon from the atmosphere...

We are having trouble removing it from Earth's, and we have far less.

The Earth used to have a lot more carbon in the atmosphere until all these pesky living things started photosynthesizing.

Re:balloon probe of venus

[dryeo]

There's a severe lack of hydrogen on Venus, so no water and much too much oxygen if it is possible to remove the carbon.

Re:balloon probe of venus

[dryeo]

Those pesky living things depend on hydrogen, in the form of H2O, of which there is a severe lack of on Venus.

Obligatory xkcd

[GuB-42]

https://xkcd.com/1456/ (title text)

Re:Obligatory xkcd

[Applehu Akbar]

Some years ago, Jerry Pournelle pointed out that we are farther away from being able to land a man on the moon than we were in 1960. And since he said that, the respect-for-science problem has gotten even worse.

Ballooning in Venus

[Crowd Computing]

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.

Re:Ballooning in Venus

[__aaclcg7560]

A manned mission to Venus was on the drawing boards in the early 1970's, including a Russian flyby of Venus on the way to Mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_Flyby

Re:Ballooning in Venus

[__aaclcg7560]

Depends on how the planets are aligned. The shortest distance between Earth and Mars happens every two years. Subsequently, the launch window for a direct flight to Mars is every two years. A flyby of Venus provides enough gravity assist to approach Mars from a different trajectory. The Russian Vega probes flew past Venus on their way to the Halley's Comet in 1986.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program

Re:Ballooning in Venus

[dryeo]

A breathable atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus and the temperature is good at the height where the Venus atmosphere is 1 bar. The big problem is the amount of corrosive acid in the atmosphere. I believe there are pretty good winds at that altitude as well.

Hey, IAU...

[pla]

"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!

The Soviets have already done Venus

[troon]

Including landers, returning pics from the surface. http://mentallandscape.com/V_V...

Re:More corporate welfare

[kellymcdonald78]

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.

Re:More corporate welfare

[barakn]

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.