WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab expects to launch a highly anticipated privately funded mission to Venus at the end of 2024, leveraging its experience from a mission to the moon.
Speaking at a meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group, or VEXAG, Oct. 29, Christopher Mandy, lead system engineer for Rocket Lab’s interplanetary missions, said the company has set a launch date of Dec. 30, 2024, for the launch of the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus.
The mission, also called the Venus Life Finder, will send a small spacecraft to Venus. A probe will separate and enter the planet’s atmosphere, equipped with a single instrument, an autofluorescence nephelometer, to detect the presence of organic compounds in droplets in the planet’s clouds. The mission is the first in a series proposed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to look for evidence of life in the atmosphere of Venus.
Rocket Lab has been collaborating with MIT and others on the mission, which relies on private funding. The mission was at one time projected to launch in May 2023, but the company delayed it as it worked on other priorities. “The Venus mission is a nights-and-weekends project,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview in April. “It gets pushed to the side all the time, but we’re still working on it.”
Mandy said the company is making good progress on the mission. “We are getting various components from external vendors,” he said, including a thermal protection system for the probe provided by NASA’s Ames Research Center and the main instrument from Droplet Measurement Technologies. Delivery of both is expected by the end of the year, allowing assembly, integration and testing of the spacecraft to take place next year.
The current schedule calls for a launch Dec. 30, although Mandy did not disclose the length of the launch period for the mission. An Electron rocket will place the 315-kilogram spacecraft into low…
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