NASA Charts Return to Venus --Update
June 02 2021 - 9:43PM
Dow Jones News
By Doug Cameron
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said it had
earmarked an initial $1 billion to send the first U.S. probes to
Venus in over 30 years, an effort to study what made the Earth's
nearest neighbor inhospitable to life.
NASA said Wednesday that it picked Lockheed Martin Corp. to
build and operate two new spacecraft to study the planet's geology
and an atmosphere shaped by a runaway greenhouse effect. Scientists
believe that what once may have been oceans on Venus boiled away,
while an Earthlike climate deteriorated to leave a surface
temperature hot enough to melt lead.
With other countries including Japan and India and even private
entrepreneurs weighing missions to the planet, NASA is opting to
launch two missions later this decade to study the planet's geology
and whether it could harbor life in its thick clouds.
Lockheed Martin plans to launch the spacecraft toward the end of
this decade and operate both under NASA's evolving public-private
partnership model, similar to its plans to return astronauts to the
moon later this decade. A predecessor to the company built the
spacecraft used on the Magellan mission to map Venus in 1989.
Plans for the two programs come as NASA builds on the political
and public capital from a renaissance in space exploration. It has
celebrated the successful launch of U.S. astronauts on domestic
rockets for the first time in more than a decade and the landing of
the Perseverance rover on Mars.
"We're ushering in a new decade of Venus to understand how an
Earthlike planet can become a hothouse," said Thomas Zurbuchen,
NASA's associate administrator for science.
Venus had been on the backburner for space exploration for years
before a resurgence in interest capped last fall by the discovery
of a molecule of phosphine gas in the atmosphere that some
scientists said could be produced by microbes.
NASA has continued to fund some Venus-related research,
including experiments to develop instruments that could work on the
planet's scorching surface. It also supported a public contest to
design a Venus rover for some future mission.
Write to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 02, 2021 21:28 ET (01:28 GMT)
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