NASA announces two new missions to Venus

Re:NASA announces two new missions to Venus by mdorazio on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @07:19PM (#27375223)

I'm happy to see NASA plan missions to Venus, but also kind of sad that these two are a basic orbiter and a drop pod. I know how much more difficult it would be, but I was hoping for an airship.

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Re:NASA announces two new missions to Venus by qayxc on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @07:55PM (#27375473)

The missions are part of the Discovery Program and are intended to be "small" (by NASA standards) missions.

They basically selected hardware that uses flight-proven sensors and instruments derived from existing and flown hardware plus one delivered by the German space agency to minimise risks and costs.

An airship would blow up the mission to a flagship-type mission, which wouldn't fit the program and would never be approved (especially in light of the utter disaster that both JWST [1] and NGRST aka WFIRST [2] turned out to be).

I'm also happy for new Venus missions and I don't mind less ambitious missions at all - I'd rather have a successful "boring" orbiter and a basic atmospheric probe by 2030 than a grandiose proposal that maybe gets approved by 2025 and then launches in 2040 :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

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Re:NASA announces two new missions to Venus by jbay808 on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @08:28PM (#27375715)

Well, it's not so recent but have you heard of the Vega missions?

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

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Re:NASA announces two new missions to Venus by mdorazio on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @10:03PM (#27376392)

I wasn't. Thank you for the link.

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