Exploring Venus may require exotic tech like balloons and ‘aerobots’

Despite being a hellish world, the hot, cloud-enveloped world Venus is a tantalizing target for scientists eager to learn more about its history, evolution and present state.

At the forefront of tackling what that puzzling place can teach us is the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VExAG), a community-based forum to help NASA shape and advance a clear strategy to probe that planet.

Late last year, a VExAG gathering included a dedicated and strategic look at exploring Venus in the next decade and beyond by way of a host of advanced technologies, from balloons to long-lived landers. A key part of this strategy is a call to scientists in the U.S. and internationally to demonstrate just how extraordinary a destination Venus is and why we should set our scientific sights on further purging the planet of its secrets.

Forge the technologies

Noam Izenberg is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and is chair of VEXAG.

VEXAG is championing a Venus Exploration Strategy, Izenberg said. One key finding stemming from deliberations within the group reflects “a strong desire to forge the technologies that will enable deeper in-situ investigation of Venus, and similar environments on other planets,” he told Space.com.

“Even through the challenges of the present day, it’s an extremely exciting time for Venus science,” Izenberg said.

Indeed, multiple missions are now on the books, such as the NASA Venus orbiter, VERITAS – short for Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy.

Work is also underway on NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) mission that features a descent probe to plunge through the planet’s clouds down to its surface.

Then there’s the European Space Agency-led Envision spacecraft to study Venus from its inner core to its outer atmosphere. Envision is a partnership with NASA, with the U.S. space agency providing a cloud-cutting Venus Synthetic Aperture Radar (VenSAR).

“The need to know more about our sister planet is already recognized – not just so that we can understand Venus and Earth better, but so that we can better understand sibling planets around other stars,” said Izenberg. “The Venus-like and Earth-like exoplanets we discover and study need the context of our Venus and our Earth, the only planets of their kind we, or our descendants, will ever actually be able to touch.”

Gory details

“To demystify Venus, we need technologies for observations that build on an improving state of knowledge, so that we can ask the tougher questions,” said James Garvin, principal investigator of the DAVINCI mission. He is also chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

NASA’s DAVINCI mission is one of several Venus missions on tap that will help improve the state of understanding of Venus’ atmosphere and its local surface, Garvin told Space.com.

To address pathfinding questions, “we need to bring the lab to the samples, so to speak, as DAVINCI will do in the early 2030’s with its well-equipped spherical Descent Sphere loaded with instruments,” said Garvin.

Information gleaned by the entourage of upcoming missions, will not only demystify Venus, Garvin said, but also present the gory details on chemistry, environments, fate of water, dynamics and human-scale landscapes on that enigmatic globe.

Beyond mysterious

Gathering new data about Venus is vital, Garvin pointed out, so that the next wave of exploration is grounded in what must be done first as scientists attempt to further reveal our sister world.

“Venus is beyond mysterious,” Garvin added. “It is vastly under-measured. So to make the tough choices on priorities for the technologies and flight systems that are so alluring, we need to measure the planet’s incredible ‘ocean of air’ atmosphere and understand its local surface.”

In doing so, Garvin said, a strategy can be pursued for asking whether Venus was habitable, and if so, for long enough to develop pathways for exotic chemistry or even for microbial life.

Next step

There’s no doubt that the VERITAS, DAVINCI, and Europe’s Envision missions are going to revolutionize our understanding of Venus.

“But the next step for Venus exploration must be in situ … exploration of the sky by aerial vehicles, and of the ground by landers and, one day, rovers,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Byrne is lead on the VEXAG Strategic Plan Study Analysis Workgroup.

“Exploring the clouds, say by balloon, can be done with technology that’s ready today,” Byrne told Space.com. “We could propose an aerial robot mission to Venus with a variable-altitude balloon to Venus now, if NASA were to hold a competition to do so,” he said.

Modern technology

A short-lived lander able to plop itself down upon the hellish Venusian landscape could also be proposed today. With modern technology and instrumentation, Byrne said, a lander could last eight hours or more, compared with the roughly one-hour-long mission durations attained decades ago by the former Soviet Union’s Venera landers, with one enduring about two hours.

“If we’re to be more adventurous,” Byrne added, “then we could talk about building larger and more capable aerial platforms, such as balloons designed to last a year or more, or capable of carrying smaller drones, or even descending below the cloud layer where temperatures start to exceed 100 degrees Celsius,” equal to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

Byrne said that a fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft could operate as a drone to a larger, passively buoyant platform.

Ambitious explorers

What about a larger aircraft? How best to get at any altitude below the Venusian clouds at 29 miles (47 kilometers), all the way down to the surface?

Whether we’re talking “passively buoyant” — that is via balloon or fixed/rotary wing aircraft, say a craft that lands on the surface between flights — Byrne said that these capabilities require the need to develop high-temperature electronics.

“Some of that work has been completed,” Byrne pointed out, “and the outlook is promising, if we can get more money for it.”

In summing up, Byrne sees the next phase of Venus exploration a call for getting into the skies and onto the ground. “And we can already take that next step, technologically,” he said, and that next step would lay the foundation for the really ambitious explorers: long-lived aerial platforms at all altitudes, long-lived landers, and eventually rovers.

However, putting visions of future Venus investigation aside, Byrne is quick to add what’s needed is serious, new investment to realize all the possibilities. “All of this requires more money than has been spent so far,” he said.