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Venus Moon Mission Scrapped as NASA Focuses on Envision Orbiter
Confirmed
In Short: NASA has shelved plans for a Venus mission, redirecting resources to the European Space Agency's Envision orbiter, which will map the planet's surface with radar.
The European Space Agency is pressing ahead with the development of the Envision orbiter, a mission to map Venus's surface at unprecedented resolution, after NASA officials decided against providing a US-built radar instrument for a planned US mission.
This shift in focus saved several key science missions, including NASA's DAVINCI probe, which was designed to study Venus's atmosphere.
Envision, set to launch in 2028, will use radar to penetrate Venus's thick clouds and search for signs of active volcanism, providing valuable insights into the planet's geology.
Meanwhile, a new paper suggests that lunar soil could contain evidence of extraterrestrial activity, as microscopic debris from advanced civilizations could accumulate on the Moon over billions of years.
However, a separate study by Stephen Kane and colleagues reveals that Venus's lack of a moon is likely a natural outcome of tidal physics, rather than evidence of a catastrophic event.
What's confirmed
- The European Space Agency is pressing ahead with the development of the Envision orbiter, a mission to map Venus's surface at unprecedented resolution, after NASA officials decided against providing a US-built radar instrument for a planned US mission.
- This shift in focus saved several key science missions, including NASA's DAVINCI probe, which was designed to study Venus's atmosphere.
- Envision, set to launch in 2028, will use radar to penetrate Venus's thick clouds and search for signs of active volcanism, providing valuable insights into the planet's geology.
- Meanwhile, a new paper suggests that lunar soil could contain evidence of extraterrestrial activity, as microscopic debris from advanced civilizations could accumulate on the Moon over billions of years.
- However, a separate study by Stephen Kane and colleagues reveals that Venus's lack of a moon is likely a natural outcome of tidal physics, rather than evidence of a catastrophic event.
What's still developing
- The European Space Agency is moving “full steam ahead” with development of a robotic mission to Venus after NASA officials determined they were unlikely to fulfill a commitment to provide a US-built radar instrument for the spacecraft, the mission’s project scientist said.
- NASA agreed to supply a US-made synthetic aperture radar instrument, Envision’s primary means of mapping the surface of Venus, along with providing tracking and communications support through NASA’s Deep Space Network.
- A cubic meter of lunar soil might be one of our best bets for finding physical proof that another advanced civilization once existed somewhere in the Milky Way, according to a new paper to be published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
- “The Moon has been quietly accumulating material from space for billions of years, much of it likely billions of years older than the Moon itself,” Dr. Pinault said.
- In the 1990s, the Ukrainian astronomer Oleksiy Arkhipov proposed that microscopic debris from alien spacecraft, probes or industrial activity could drift across interstellar space and quietly pile up on stable, ancient surfaces like the Moon.
- They found that sufficiently tough, refractory particles could travel thousands of light-years over hundreds of millions to billions of years, occasionally arriving at the Earth-Moon system slowly enough — thanks to solar radiation pressure and the Sun’s magnetic ‘bubble,’ the heliosphere — to survive impact rather than vaporize.
- In a new paper just being published by The Astrophysical Journal, longtime Venus researcher Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside and colleagues, show that a moon around Venus would have been doomed from the start.
- The team’s modeling shows that in most plausible scenarios, any moon Venus once had would spiral inward and be torn apart by the planet’s own gravity.