40 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE May | June 2017
NASA / JPL-CALTECHArtist's impression of the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science,
InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy spacecraft. VERITAS
reached the finals, but NASA chose two other missions.HELLO, MY NAME IS DAVID, and I have
a Venus problem. For decades I’ve had
an unhealthy compulsion. I’ve been
doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting a different result.
And there’s a whole community of us
who share this questionable obsession.
The title of this column is the
perennial answer to where NASA will
send its next interplanetary spacecraft.
The US hasn’t launched to Venus since- That mission, Magellan, revealed
our sister planet to be an incredibly
beautiful and geologically interesting
place, and it raised many new questions:
What’s in that thick atmosphere? Was
there an ocean, and for how long?
Could life have gotten started? In the
wake of Magellan, we thought these and
other burning questions would logically
lead to new NASA spacecraft that would
address them.
Since then we Venus researchers have
proposed orbiters, entry probes, balloons
and landers. Every one has been shot
down. Part of the problem is that the
risk of Venus missions is perceived as
too high. The observing conditions are
so challenging that, judged against a
mission to a more well-explored planet,
we will always get less data with more
risk, for the same money.
The Europeans and Japanese have
helped fill the gap with small missionsthat have kept some vital data flowing.
But without data from ambitious new
NASA missions there’s less funding for
new studies, fewer resources to train
students, and fewer people coming into
the field. Yet every time NASA has called
for proposals, we’ve gone back for more.
It’s the fix we can’t resist.
Recently we made the finals. In
NASA’s Discovery Program competition,
for missions costing up to US$450million, the agency selected two Venus
contenders for the final round, out of
five total. We’d been through many
competitions in which no Venus
missions had been selected. We’d been
assured by many NASA officials that this
doesn’t reflect policy or official bias, and
encouraged to keep trying. Now we had
40% of the finalists. It felt like it could
be our time at last.
So a lot of us took it very hard when
we learned in January that NASA had
chosen two missions, neither going to
Venus. Both are worthwhile and exciting,
flying to new kinds of asteroids never
before visited. But how are we supposed
to respond, emotionally and strategically,
to our repeated defeat? We are like sports
fans whose team had made it to the
grand final but hadn’t won. Do we buy
tickets for another season? At what point
are we no longer admirably committed,
but merely pitiful?
Alas, we will get up, dust ourselves
off, and try again. NASA is soliciting
proposals for the next iteration of the
New Frontiers Program, which has a
higher budget than a Discovery mission.
Several teams are organising to propose
new Venus sorties.
I could make up excuses for this
behaviour pattern. I could tell you why
sooner or later the US must return to
Venus, because without doing so there
will be limits to our ability to understand
Earth, or climate, or what exoplanets are
really like. I could tell you that we keep
trying because sooner or later the gapsin our knowledge — compared to other
places in the Solar System — will become
so glaring that it would be as if we’d
explored the entire Earth carefully but
ignored one whole continent.
But really we just can’t help
ourselves. Someday, someday...DAVID GRINSPOON is a scientist at
the Planetary Science Institute. Follow
him on Twitter at @DrFunkySpoon.Not Venus again
Once more, NASA leaves our sister planet out of the mix
of new missions. Ouch.We are like sports fans whose team had made it to the grand
final but hadn’t won. Do we buy tickets for another season?COSMIC RELIEF by David Grinspoon