Digital Trends by Georgina Torbet 7/15/2023
If you’ve been following space news recently, you’ve probably heard about Mars Sample Return — NASA’s ambitious plan to collect samples of Martian rocks and bring them back to Earth for study. That mission is scheduled to launch later this decade, but it will be a years-long and extremely expensive process to collect and retrieve those samples.
But Mars isn’t the only planet within visiting distance. Why don’t we hop over to our other planetary neighbor, Venus, and collect a sample from there as well?
That’s just what is being proposed by a group of Venus researchers. We spoke to the leader of the proposal group to learn more.
An old idea whose time has comeScientists have been discussing the merits of trying to nab a sample from Venus for decades, with mission concepts studied as far back as the 1980s. Although Mars has been the planet that has received the most attention in recent years, there’s a strong interest in the planetary science community in learning more about Venus — particularly because it could help us understand more about other planets outside our solar system.
Now that could be changing, as NASA kicks off the decade of Venus with a pair of missions set to visit there, along with a European Space Agency mission, all scheduled for the next decade.
Previous Venus sample missions never got off the ground for a few reasons: the focus on Mars over Venus, the lack of technology to enable such a complex operation, and the essential inhospitality of Venus. Venus is hot, with an extremely dense atmosphere, creating a very harsh environment for electronics to operate in.
Trying to fly to Venus, send a probe down to the surface, collect a sample, get that sample back up to orbit, and then return it to Earth would be both prohibitively expensive and would require significant technological developments.
That’s why a group of French researchers has a different approach. Instead of trying to collect a piece of Venus’s surface, we should try to grab some of its atmosphere. The Venus Atmospheric Sample Return mission or VATMOS-SR is a mission concept by a group at the Paris Institute of Planetary Physics, who are trying to drum up support for their idea.
The great advantage of this approach is its relative simplicity. There’s no need to land anything on the surface or to get back to orbit. Instead, you could send one spacecraft on a path away from Earth and toward Venus, where it would enter the atmosphere and fill bottles with around four liters of gas. Then it would keep on traveling right back to Earth.
The spacecraft would have no instruments and take no readings. It would just be a collection vehicle. That makes it safer, easier, and cheaper, lead researcher Guillaume Avice explained to Digital Trends.
More:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/wild-plan-to-bring-home-venus-atmosphere/
