“Our meetings are not as well attended because we’ve got no mission. “Our community is passionate about Venus, but we’re getting pretty thin,” said Grimm, who mostly works on Mars data now. The lack of spacecraft and new data has starved the Venus community of many of its scientists. But since Magellan burned up in the Venusian atmosphere in 1994, NASA has had no presence at Venus, even while sending probe after probe to Mars. The space agency hasn’t selected a mission to explore Venus since 1983, when it began developing what would become the Magellan probe that was tasked with making a global radar map of the cloud-shrouded world.
NASA has long neglected the world often described as Earth’s wayward sister. Perhaps the decision shouldn’t have surprised Grimm. “And to be honest, it’s really galvanized me to change the perception of Venus.” “It was both a surprise and a disappointment,” he told Ars in an interview. The decision left Grimm, who chairs the Venus Exploration Advisory Group but did not have a stake in either proposed mission, crestfallen. Instead it chose to send spacecraft to both a group of asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit and a metal-rich rock in the asteroid belt. Yet NASA did not ultimately select a Venus mission. Further Reading NASA chooses two asteroid missions instead of a Venus return
0 kommentar(er)
