Most missions collect samples and analyze them in situ with relatively basic instruments. This mission takes a totally different approach.
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.
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. 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.
And with a precious sample from another planet, a little goes a long way. A sample of several liters of gas could keep scientists busy for years. An upcoming mission to Venus called Davinci plans to make similar measurements of the atmosphere, but in this case, there’s a real time crunch. The mission involves dropping a sample sphere through the atmosphere, so samples have to be taken and processed within just one hour.
How the atmospheric sampling mission would work There are good reasons that no one has attempted a Venus sample return mission before though. Because it isn’t easy. Even with the relative ease of an atmospheric sample, however, not any old bit of the atmosphere will do. At very high altitudes, the atmosphere is extremely thin, and some molecules are separated out by gravity. So to get a representative sample, you need to go below a level called the homopause, below which the atmosphere is sufficiently well mixed to contain all the different molecules present.
Delivering a rover to Mars, for example, involves wrapping the rover in a heat shield, and then sealing the entire thing — rover and heat shield together, along with thrusters and other spacecraft parts — into the nosecone of a rocket for launch. Once in space, the spacecraft is deployed and travels to Mars, then the heat shield protects the rover as it passes through the atmosphere to land.
The Venus atmosphere is full of substances that easily evaporate, called volatiles. These include noble gases and compounds including nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, and sulfur. Studying these is key to understanding Venus’s atmosphere, but they aren’t easy to transport or study.
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