Scientists Erupt At NASA Gutting Funding For Crucial Venus Mission (theverge.com) 61
The scientific community is reeling after NASA gutted funding for a key Venus mission that was "poised to answer some of the biggest questions about the planet and its volcanic activity," reports The Verge. From the report: This month saw the announcement of one of the most exciting findings about Venus in decades: the first direct evidence of an active volcano there. [...] This finding is "mind-blowing," Venus scientist Darby Dyar told The Verge, opening up possibilities to learn about Venus' geology and atmosphere as well as whether the planet was once habitable. But in the space science community, the excitement about this finding is being overshadowed by the "soft cancellation" of a key NASA Venus mission, which Dyar is also deputy principal investigator for and which had been set to launch in 2028.
The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission was one of three missions set to explore Venus in the next few years, kicking off NASA's "decade of Venus" and seeing a return to the study of our planetary neighbor, which scientists have been calling for for years. But at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held recently in Houston, Texas, VERITAS principal investigator Sue Smrekar announced that the mission's funding had been completely gutted, leaving the mission in a state of precarious limbo.
This came as a surprise to many of the conference attendees, who were soon tweeting their support for the mission using the hashtag #SaveVERITAS. The Planetary Society also put out a statement describing the delay of the mission's launch by at least three years as "uncalled-for" and calling on NASA to commit to launching by 2029. NASA has cited problems with another mission, Psyche, as the reason for delaying VERITAS by at least three years. Both Psyche and VERITAS are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the NASA / Caltech research center that is responsible for building robotic spacecraft such as the Mars rovers. JPL had problems meeting its requirements for the Psyche mission, which aims to visit a metal asteroid, and missed its launch date last year. An independent review into the missed launch found it was due to, among other problems, workforce issues at JPL. Budget cuts and cancellations aren't uncommon, but the situation with VERITAS is different because it "had already been selected by NASA to be part of its Discovery Program," adds the Verge. "Historically, once a mission has been selected by NASA, those working on it can be confident that funding will be available. If a delay happens -- as is not uncommon in large, complex missions -- then a lower level of funding is typically made available to keep the basic essentials in place, called bridge funding, until full funding can be restored."
Although the team asked NASA for bridge funding to maintain mission essentials, "virtually all of their funding has been cut, leaving them with a tiny $1.5 million per year," says the report. "This is a highly unusual situation for a selected mission because delaying and restarting missions is so expensive."
The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission was one of three missions set to explore Venus in the next few years, kicking off NASA's "decade of Venus" and seeing a return to the study of our planetary neighbor, which scientists have been calling for for years. But at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held recently in Houston, Texas, VERITAS principal investigator Sue Smrekar announced that the mission's funding had been completely gutted, leaving the mission in a state of precarious limbo.
This came as a surprise to many of the conference attendees, who were soon tweeting their support for the mission using the hashtag #SaveVERITAS. The Planetary Society also put out a statement describing the delay of the mission's launch by at least three years as "uncalled-for" and calling on NASA to commit to launching by 2029. NASA has cited problems with another mission, Psyche, as the reason for delaying VERITAS by at least three years. Both Psyche and VERITAS are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the NASA / Caltech research center that is responsible for building robotic spacecraft such as the Mars rovers. JPL had problems meeting its requirements for the Psyche mission, which aims to visit a metal asteroid, and missed its launch date last year. An independent review into the missed launch found it was due to, among other problems, workforce issues at JPL. Budget cuts and cancellations aren't uncommon, but the situation with VERITAS is different because it "had already been selected by NASA to be part of its Discovery Program," adds the Verge. "Historically, once a mission has been selected by NASA, those working on it can be confident that funding will be available. If a delay happens -- as is not uncommon in large, complex missions -- then a lower level of funding is typically made available to keep the basic essentials in place, called bridge funding, until full funding can be restored."
Although the team asked NASA for bridge funding to maintain mission essentials, "virtually all of their funding has been cut, leaving them with a tiny $1.5 million per year," says the report. "This is a highly unusual situation for a selected mission because delaying and restarting missions is so expensive."
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consider.
observing venus from the moon would be very useful.
just throwing it out there.
also.
i wish i could mod you plus 1 insightful
Mission cost: $500M (Score:2)
TFS and TFA say the budget is cut, but neither mentions what the budget is.
According to Wikipedia, the mission cost is $500M.
VERITAS Spacecraft [wikipedia.org]
Re: Crowd fund it, maybe? (Score:3)
Last I checked, NASA got a massive 3% of DOD's total budget.
Just to put costs a bit in perspective.
Lying! (Score:4, Insightful)
They’re not even called pensions here. The VA budget is only 300 Bil also the dod also doesn’t spend most of its money on pay or benefits either
https://www.cbo.gov/publicatio... [cbo.gov]
Just made up stuff by a guy who wants to harm our veterans.
I see that the longstanding US tradition... (Score:3)
... of neglecting study of the most Earthlike planet in the solar system outside of Earth continues unabated.
There's always comparably infinite funding for Mars, but make the first dedicated US Venus mission in over three decades, and of course it still remains eminently cancellable.
Looks like RocketLab's Venus probe is going to be the only thing out of the US making a dedicated visit to Venus any time soon.
Re: I see that the longstanding US tradition... (Score:1)
The reason we find Mars more interesting is because it's the planet we're the most likely to be able to colonize for... a lot of reasons.
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The reason we find Mars more interesting is because it's the planet we're the most likely to be able to colonize for... a lot of reasons.
It also helps that things we land on the surface of mars aren't dissolved in minutes by clouds of sulfuric acid.
.
Re: I see that the longstanding US tradition... (Score:5, Informative)
The amusing thing is that you think you're describing Venus. ;)
FYI:
1) There is essentially zero sulfuric acid at Venus's surface. It's not stable in those conditions. Sulfur is overwhemingly in the form of sulfur dioxide on the surface.
2) Sulfuric acid (and other acids, including phosphoric and hydrochloric - the former being mainly in the lower cloud layer, the latter more commonly as free hydrogen chloride but sometimes as aerosols) doesn't begin to be found until you get closer to the lower cloud layer (it probably exists a limited distance between the lower cloud layer as a virga).
3) Nowhere on Venus is a place where anything would be "dissolved in minutes" by sulfuric acid. Venus's sulfuric acid is a sparse vog (volcanic equivalent of smog). While the aerosols are higher molar than Earth smogs/vogs, visibility in the middle cloud layer is several kilometers.
4) There is a possibility that sulfuric acid rains, snows, or frosts might exists at times in certain layers (we know so damned little about Venus, which is why such mission cancellations are frustrating); the Vega balloon data was first interpreted as suggesting that there weren't any, but has since been reinterpreted as suggesting that there were, probably more likely frosts than liquids or snow if so. But even if that were the case:
5) Material compatibility with even high molar sulfuric acid is quite common and not at all a difficult engineering challenge, esp. with aerospace-grade materials. A milk jug could sit in 85% (Venus aerosol concentration), submerged in a literal bath of it, for years on end with no impact. As far as metals go, even carbon steel - that stuff that rusts away just from exposure to water and air - is resistant to sulfuric acid attack. Not just talking sparse mists here, but soaking in a literal bath of it. There are of course metals and polymers that aren't, but you just simply... don't use those ones.
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At Venus's operating temperature you don't need acid. The point is there is no way even for machinery to survive on the surface long enough to do anything useful.
Mars is just cold and dusty. It's manageable.
A Teflon weather balloon is about all we can do with Venus.
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If you don't mean acid, then don't say "dissolved in minutes by clouds of sulfuric acid"
And Venus's surface is perfectly managable. The Soviets were managing it just fine with tech they developed back in the 1960s. We have much better technology today. And Mars's dust, which coats solar panels, gets into electronics, and is corrosive and toxic, is not some trivial thing to dismiss, but rather a heavily mission-shaping parameter. And isn't even remotely "just" the only problem Mars has.
As for going further
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And Venus's surface is perfectly managable. The Soviets were managing it just fine with tech they developed back in the 1960s.
Is that why the current record survival time for a spacecraft lander on Venus is 2 hours? Because it's so manageable?
My dude, you're insane. We have better tech, yes, but our tech isn't so much better that we'll have rovers on Venus running about for years on end like we get with Mars rovers. The Soviets ran missions into the 80's (and so did we, but we didn't really do landers), and our materials aren't significantly more heat and pressure resistant than they were then. The research data you get per dollar
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Venus's atmosphere is so gentle that if you launched a hollow titanium sphere from Earth on the right trajectory, it would reach Venus, enter its atmosphere, descend, and land intact, without any sort of entry, descent, or landing system at all. Remind me, how many times has landing killed Mars spacecraft?
DAVINCI is not designed to last longer than that because its mission doesn't require it, not because "It's impossible". Do you think it's impossible for a mission to survive on Titan's for more than a cou
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Venus has a layer at altitude where a nitrogen oxygen atmosphere is lifting, think balloon or zeppelin and you could go outside mostly naked, basically a scuba outfit, oxygen and eye protection and a shower right after being outside, bonus you will weigh 10% less then on Earth. Try doing that on Mars.
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The reason we find Mars more interesting is because it's the planet we're the most likely to be able to colonize for... a lot of reasons.
It also helps that things we land on the surface of mars aren't dissolved in minutes by clouds of sulfuric acid. .
So just go above the clouds.
Oh wait . . .
Re: I see that the longstanding US tradition... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess if you like poor orbital dynamics, surface radiation, muscle atrophy, low energy densities, a near-vacuum, low mobility across the surface, and toxic / corrosive electrostatic dust laden with things like perchlorates and hexavalent chromium.
Don't get me wrong, Venus's middle cloud layer has its disadvantages as well (access to most cations being the notable one, and while reusable chemical rockets are possible, sustainable habitation becomes much more practical with NTR). But it's not nearly as one-sided as many people pretend it is. Venus's middle cloud layer has abundant energy, radiation shielding equivalent to having 5+ meters of water overhead, excellent orbital dynamics, earthlike gravity, earthlike air pressure, high mobility around the surface, and its corrosives (a sparse vog) are not only easily withstood by a wide range of polymers and metals, but actually a resource (the aerosols are easy to attract, and with heating, first free water bakes off, then the H2SO4 splits into H2O and SO3, and then you can either heat the SO3 further over a vanadium pentoxide catalyst to split it to SO2 and O2, or reinject it into your scrubber as a conditioning agent to help nucleate more moisture). There's a wide range of chemical resources in Venus's complex atmosphere - even a bit of iron, in the form of iron chloride - and the hydrogen is over two orders of magnitude richer in deuterium than on Earth, aka a potential export commodity. Most critically, it contains everything needed for the sort of petrochemical industry needed to maintain and expand its polymer envelope. The (hot but accessible) surface is more minerologically interesting than Mars as well - unique and extensive enrichment processes and nearly no overburden. Normal Earth air is easily produced on Venus and is a lifting gas, with half the lift that helium has on Earth; humans could live inside a transparent envelope. And so as far as quality of life goes, would you rather live in a tiny pressure vessel habitat with few windows, or a massive, sprawling, brightly lit hanging garden?
Again, I'm not saying Mars doesn't have it's appeal. But if you asked me to choose between being cooped up in a tiny pressure vessel with artificial light and having my muscles atrophy, in exchange for the occasional couple-hour outdoor walk in an inconvenient space suit where you can never feel the outside air and on which toxic dust gets on everything - or living in a sprawling, brightly lit hanging hydroponic garden on open platforms and hammock-tents strung between catenary curtains / lifting cells (and still possibly having the potential for a surface walk, albeit in a heavier, more complex suit - one on which I can literally fly) - I'm not going to have to think very long about that choice.
Re: I see that the longstanding US tradition... (Score:1)
I dunno I'm just having a hard time picturing how a perpetually floating city is supposed to work. It just seems a bit more realistic to put an actual atmosphere on Mars. And it might even be the ideal place for disabled people.
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It seems easier to put two quadrillion tonnes on Mars than to have a balloon on Venus?
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earthlike air pressure
Narrator: And that was the moment the poster lost all credibility.
The surface of Venus is about 75x the pressure of Earth because of its heavier atmospheric composition. Standing on the surface of Venus is equivalent to the pressure of being 2460ft underwater on Earth.
And by the time you've gone high enough above the surface to alleviate that pressure, you're in a haze or literal liquid of incredibly concentrated acid.
I really don't understand how so many people have no understanding of how diffic
Re:I see that the longstanding US tradition... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think a lot of it has come down to optics. We can land stuff on Mars and have it last many years. A Venus lander might last four hours. I think there's a fear the public will see that and just Not Get It. It's not a completely irrational fear.
But I don't see why that seems to extend to allVenus missions, even those which aren't going to land and have reasonable projected lifespans. It now appears there is quite recent volcanism on the surface -- I don't mean a million years ago, I mean between scanning passes of the last mission! There's also the phosphine measurement to hopefully confirm or deny.
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It's surfaceism. If Venus's surface was higher up, nobody would be talking about Mars. Its middle cloud layer is the most Earthlike place in the solar system apart from Earth. It's almost weird how Earthlike it is - for example, patterns of turbulence, the incidence rate of lighting, all sorts of things very much match Earth norms. It's not breathable, and it's of course "voggy", and that vog (quiet sparse, but high molar) would probably cause skin irritation if you were exposed to it for too long (and yo
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What's moronic is making assertions about "Venus rain" when we don't even know if rain exists on Venus.
Venus's middle cloud layer's vog is so sparse that visibility is several kilometers. Smog gets a lot denser than in some places on Earth. Again, Venus's aerosols are higher molar than Earth vog/smog aerosols, but it is not some sort of acid bath. The amount is measured in micrograms per cubic metre.
And again, the popular perception of acids - even in bulk concentrated pure liquid form - just isn't all th [slashdot.org]
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... of neglecting study of the most Earthlike planet in the solar system outside of Earth continues unabated.
"Earthlike"? How are Venus surface conditions anything like Earth?
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... of neglecting study of the most Earthlike planet in the solar system outside of Earth continues unabated.
"Earthlike"? How are Venus surface conditions anything like Earth?
They are similar to the Earth 4.5 billion years ago [phys.org].
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Well, for starters, it helps if you don't insert things into my sentences that I didn't say ("Venus surface conditions").
There's two ways to look at what I actually wrote ("the most Earthlike planet in the solar system outside of Earth"):
1) The planet from a macroscopic perspective. This is easy. It's close to Earth's mass (unlike Mars). Formed in the same way as Earth (no heavy domination of dynamics from Jupiter, like with Mars). Bulk structure between the two planets is very similar. Early Venus prob
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To elaborate more on #1:
1) Earth and Venus have almost the exact same uncompressed bulk densities [springernature.com] of just over 4000kg/m^3, due to them having roughly the same ratio of iron to lighter elements. Mars is on the low-iron side, and Mercury rather far off on the high-iron side.
2) When it comes to compressed bulk densities [gstatic.com], it reverses - Venus and Earth remain close (5,2 and 5,5g/cm3, respectively), but now Mercury is in the middle of the mix (5,4g/cm3), while Mars is way off on the light side (3,9g/cm3)
3) Struc
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Problems at JPL (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't a big part of this because of things going sideways at JPL? Last year a report was commissioned by NASA on the problems leading to the delay of JPL's mission to the asteroid Psyche, only for the report to conclude that the problems weren't just with that one mission, but rather endemic to all of JPL.
One of the problems identified was that JPL's staff is spread too thinly across too many missions, especially the programmers and engineers. IIRC the decision was made to review each JPL mission, and cancel or delay any that hadn't reached a given milestone, to free up programmers and engineers for the missions that were closer to their launch dates. Which also has the side effect of buying time to resolve the deeper structural problems that've cropped up at JPL over the last few years.
https://spacenews.com/psyche-r... [spacenews.com]
Re: Problems at JPL (Score:1)
Yes, this.
My brother works with (not at) NASA. Many of these projects lose funding not because of scientific merit, but rather because the project is not proceeding as planned.
They review regularly to try to prevent throwing good money after bad.
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This is short-sighted: programmers and engineers are non-fungible.
Even if the ones that were freed up have the right skills for Psyche (not a given if they just looked at reached milestones, even ignoring that VERITAS is a radar mission and Psyche is imager/spectrometer/gravity), getting new people up to speed takes time. There'll be a period where using existing staff to train incoming staff will actually slow down
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That was one of the suggestions to help the overall situation at JPL, not one specifically for Psyche.
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Argument still applies, to a significant degree. The article you linked makes general reference to JPL having an "unprecedented workload", but unless the people freed up in the project cuts can usefully contribute to other projects, those cuts won't necessarily alleviate that workload. I see no indication in the review board documentation that they took that into consideration.
Spending all that money on the SLS (Score:2)
$40 billion for the first launch.
No wonder no money is left for anything else.
Only $1.5 million/year (Score:2)
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That was BTW how the Soviets pulled it off. They launched all their Venera missions in pairs, and built a lot of them on similar designs, to overcome their problems with reliability (particularly with respect to their rockets). In typical Soviet fashion, when a rocket failed, they didn't even bother announcing that the launch had occurred. When one probe made it to Venus, they acted like it was a single-probe mission, and when both did, they acted like it was a dual-probe mission.
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It may surprise you to learn that the purpose of the Venera mission was not "to collect shitty pictures".
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Funding agencies don't like uncertainty. They want everything to be a "sure thing".
So infuriating. (Score:2)
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Are you in favor of or opposed to the US arming Ukraine?
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Not that any of that is relevant to this topic, but thanks for sharing your obsession.
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Law abiding? You mean like the CIA overthrowing a democratically elected Ukraine government in 2014 and then following up with off the charts tax payer funded military support to keep their puppet in power?
Yes I am obsessed with international law. Why aren't you?
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So we didn't overthrow the democratically elected 2014 Ukraine government?
Or we're not spending billions of tax dollars to prop up our puppet?
Which of those well known public facts are you saying is a lie?
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Wow, that's such a huge retcon.
The previous government was democratically elected. But was pro-Putin. So the CIA did what they always do. Created a revolution and installed a friendly pro-US puppet.
And the Trump 2016 thing is hilariously debunked. Why did you even go there? Please join us in 2023 where literally everyone but apparently you knows all the Trump Russia! Russia! Russia! stuff was a lie funded by the Hilary campaign.
So again, are you saying the pro-Putin government was not elected?
Or
Are you
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Something to read while this sorts out (Score:2)
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth
https://archive.org/details/do... [archive.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I guess Artemis needs money (Score:2)
Should have given it to APL (Score:2)
delaying and restarting missions is so expensive (Score:1)
Money (Score:2)
This pisses me off. (Score:1)
We should have fucking electron microscoped(and every other gizmo) rovers with AI operated robots driving them on EVERY damn planet by now. Wtf?!?
Instead: Hey, what's in your pants that might offend me?
Bound to happen (Score:2)
This was bound to happen with NASA letting various projects run wild with their cost overruns. The next mobile launch pad for Artemis is a billion dollars overbudget, James Webb was around 3 times overbudget, on and on. NASA has to start setting hard limits contracts, it has pretty much become part of the management culture there that budget overruns "just happen". With the mobile launcher they were still handing out multimillion dollar "performance bonuses" despite it being behind schedule and over budg
ahem. There's nothing CRUCIAL about... (Score:2)
a Venus mission. There simply isn't. I love science and space missions and remember absorbing everything I could get from the Voyager missions as they gave us our first good looks at most of our solar system. Venus is certainly very interesting, and I'd love to know more about the place. Given the choice between spending money on another deep space telescope, and spending money on a Venus probe, I'd happily spend on a Venus probe.
This is about priorities for TAXPAYER money. There's a limited amount of cash