The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Wesleyan professor developing plans for NASA missions to Venus
Wesleyan University professor and planetary geologist Martha Gilmore is developing plans for NASA missions to Venus, to collect data and better understand the evolution of Earth’s next-door neighbor.
She’s a member of two teams that are among the four competing for selection in NASA’s Discovery Program, which recently received $3 million each to continue working on the mission concepts.
“These selected missions have the potential to transform our understanding of some of the solar system’s most active and complex worlds,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a news release. “Exploring any one of these celestial bodies will help unlock the secrets of how it, and others like it, came to be in the cosmos.”
VERITAS, or Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy, would be an orbiter that would “help us map the entire planet of Venus in a way that we haven’t been able to do before,” Gilmore said.
The effort would be similar to mapping that’s already been done on Mars, which was “integral to our being able to pinpoint on Mars, for example, which places are places where water was,” she said. Different instruments are needed because of Venus’s very thick atmosphere, so the VERITAS mission would use a “radar camera that’s unprecedented in its ability to see smaller regions that haven’t been seen before,” Gilmore said. It could measure surface heights and elevations and look for changes in surface structures, which would provide information about tectonic or volcanic activity and geologic processes.
DAVINCI+, or Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus, would send a probe into the planet’s lower atmosphere, where it interacts with the surface.
“Having a very good record of the chemical composition of
the atmosphere of Venus all the way down is an incredible missing element of our understanding of how the Venus atmosphere has evolved and how the atmosphere and the rocks work together,” she said. On Earth, the interactions between the surface and the atmosphere are what control the climate.
Either mission, if selected, would carry an instrument that can help detect the properties of rocks on the surface. With more information about the mineralogy, researchers can learn about how much water was at one point on the planet’s surface, Gilmore said.
In studying Venus, there’s an opportunity to learn more about “Earth’s twin,” VERITAS Primary Investigator Suzanne Smerkar said in a NASA video announcing the mission’s selection. Both planets “started out the same size, the same composition,
but (Venus) evolved into an extremely inhospitable place,” she said.
“We want to understand why that happened, and what is the process by which a terrestrial planet becomes habitable,” Gilmore said. Elsewhere in the galaxy, there are similar Earth-sized exoplanets, but none of them are able to be reached and studied in the same way as Venus.
The missions were selected to continue in the Discovery Program by panels of scientists and engineers, and the teams around the country will continue working on the concepts over the next nine months. James Garvin, Chief Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, is the primary investigator for DAVINCI+, and Smrekar, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, leads the VERITAS team.
Gilmore said working on two competing missions is “like your kids, you love them both equally.” It’s not unusual for there to be overlap, because
the community of scientists who study Venus is small, she said.
That’s due in part to the “30-year hiatus of geological data” from the planet, since the last U.S. mission, the Magellan mission that launched in May 1989 and arrived at the planet in August 1990. “Missions drive data,” she said, and a successful mission to Venus would result in more data, and then more research about the planet.
NASA will ultimately select up to two of the four Discovery Program investigations next year; the other two finalist missions would investigate Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, and Neptune’s moon, Triton. Discovery Program missions that have already been selected will launch in upcoming years: Lucy will launch in 2021 to visit asteroids that orbit the Sun in front of and behind Jupiter, and Psyche, which will explore a giant metal asteroid known as 16 Psyche, will launch in 2023.