The annual meeting of a scientific committee called the Venus Exploration Analysis Group, or VEXAG, coincided this year with Halloween. Befitting the occasion, there were both tricks and treats for scientists studying the planet Venus.
The treat was the promise of upcoming missions. Within the next decade, two NASA spacecraft, DAVINCI and VERITAS, and Europe’s EnVision, will go to Venus, studying its surface and atmosphere in unprecedented detail, ending for NASA a decades-long drought in Venus missions.
“We are going to see a type of Venus that we have never seen before,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, at the meeting, thanks to instruments like high-resolution radar imagery. “We’re going to see stuff at Venus that’s going to be insane.”
The trick is that one of those missions, VERITAS, still faces an extended delay. A year ago, NASA announced it was postponing VERITAS by three years to 2031 after an independent review found institutional problems at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that contributed to a delay in the Psyche asteroid mission. Putting VERITAS on hold, the agency explained, would ensure sufficient resources for Psyche and other high-priority missions.
The mission’s leaders are still lobbying to move up VERITAS. Sue Smrekar, VERITAS principal investigator at JPL, argued that many of the problems at the lab that prompted the delay had been resolved. A launch in late 2029, she said, was still feasible “if we get rolling in the next year.”
VERITAS, though, faces more than just issues at JPL. “It’s totally true that the budget is a mess,” she acknowledged. NASA’s planetary science program is facing severe challenges from both overall budget pressures at the agency as well as cost growth on one of its flagships, Mars Sample Return (MSR).
In September, an independent committee concluded MSR had “unrealistic” cost and schedule estimates and could…
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