Academic groups try to save NASA’s mission to Venus – 09/04/2023 – Sidereal Messenger

A group of academic organizations in the United States has launched a campaign to save one of the missions to Venus planned by NASA for this decade, frozen indefinitely by the American space agency from its budget proposal for 2024.

The campaign to save the Veritas mission, launched last Wednesday (5) by the NGO Planetary Society (founded by Carl Sagan) and supported by the American Geophysical Union, the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Tulane University in New Orleans (Louisiana), and Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley (Massachusetts), asks the US Congress to establish a new launch date that does not exceed 2029, forcing NASA to allocate resources for the project.

The whole problem started with another mission, Psyche, which goes to the asteroid belt and is coordinated by JPL, the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After a launch delay (which was supposed to have been last year), an independent panel came to the conclusion that JPL had organizational and staffing problems, lacking adequate staff to fulfill all of its tasks – including carrying out Veritas. .

To ensure that Psyche successfully flies next October and that there is no impact on other high-priority missions, such as the Europa Clipper (scheduled for launch in 2024), NASA decided, at the end of last year, to take Veritas to the altar. of sacrifice, interrupting work – which until then had been on time and within budget for a flight in 2027.

With the implementation of this plan (and zero funding in the proposed budget for NASA next year), came the cry from the academic community, which has long been waiting for a new mission to Venus, a kind of “evil twin” of Earth with ultradense atmosphere and surface temperature of 460 degrees Celsius that has gained recent attention with evidence of volcanism and potential biosignatures in the upper atmosphere.

Academic groups point out that, in addition to delaying Venusian exploration with the potential to lose leadership to other countries (China intends to launch an orbiter in 2026), the project sabotages international collaborations, since Europeans had already committed more than $90 millions in instrumentation and mission support. To rectify that, Congress could set a flight date in 2029, already contemplating two years of delay to resolve JPL’s internal problems.

It would not be the first time that congressmen are called upon to save missions subjected to cancellations or indefinite postponements by NASA. Among those who came back from limbo because of them are the last repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope (without which it would have been deactivated) and New Horizons, a probe that visited Pluto in 2015.

A second mission to Venus selected by NASA along with Veritas in the Discovery program, Davinci+, is still underway for launch in 2029. But, as the two are complementary, the American plan for Venusian exploration at the moment balances on one leg.

This column is published on Mondays in the printed version, in Folha Corrida.

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