15.11.2022
Delayed NASA VERITAS Venus mission looks for a reprieve
NASA delayed the launch of VERITAS to no earlier than 2031 in response to issues with the Psyche mission, but the leader of the VERITAS mission says she will try to shorten that delay. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — The head of a Venus mission delayed at least three years by NASA in response to problems with another mission says she will attempt to shorten that delay.
As part of the Nov. 4 release of an independent review board’s report on the delays with the Psyche mission, which uncovered broader institutional issues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where it was being developed, NASA announced it would delay the launch of the Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy, or VERITAS, Venus orbiter mission by at least three years, to no earlier than 2031. VERITAS, like Psyche, is run by JPL.
“This postponement can offset both the workforce imbalance for at least those three years and provide some of the increased funding that will be required to continue Psyche towards that 2023 launch,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at an online town hall meeting to discuss the report.
NASA selected VERITAS and another Venus mission, DAVINCI+, in the latest round of its Discovery program of planetary science missions in June 2021. While VERITAS will study the planet from orbit, DAVINCI+, or Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging, will send a probe into the planet’s atmosphere. It remains scheduled for launch in June 2029.
The announcement of the delay in VERITAS came days before the annual meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group, or VEXAG, to discuss Venus science and planned missions like VERITAS. Scientists used part of the meeting to discuss the ramifications of the delay of the mission and efforts to minimize the delay.
Suzanne Smrekar of JPL, principal investigator for VERITAS, said there were no problems with the mission itself when NASA decided to delay it. “To this point, we have been on schedule and on budget, and we have an excellent and highly experienced team,” she said in a Nov. 7 presentation about the mission.
VERITAS had already taken steps to address recommendations from the Psyche independent review, such as moving work out of JPL and reducing spending in 2022 and 2023. “We had already done our best faith effort to contribute to the issues being faced.”
She said she wanted to work with NASA and the science community on ways to shorten the delay, noting there were “many opportunities” between the mission’s original launch date of the end of 2027 and the current no-earlier-than date of 2031 to launch VERITAS. “There are many chances to pull back from the brink if things improve.”
Delaying VERITAS creates problems for the mission and its team, Smrekar. Several of the orbiter’s instruments are provided by partners in France, Germany and Italy, who are also working on a European Space Agency Venus mission, EnVision. “This puts the workforce pileup onto our foreign partners, and we’ll be working to assess these consequences.”
The delay in VERITAS means it will launch at about the same time as EnVision. Scientists had planned to use data from VERITAS to inform planning for EnVision, such as looking for active volcanism and other changes on the planet. Smrekar said it was unclear if there were technical issues about operating the missions at the same time, including conducting aerobraking in the atmosphere of Venus.
She added she was concerned that the delay would force it to disband the team currently assembled, creating a loss of expertise that the independent review had warned about. It will also affect the science team, including students and early-career researchers. “We want to continue to find a way to engage them despite the fact that the data is so far out.”
“There are many, many downsides to doing this with respect to the knowledge base, the expertise, the risk, the cost,” she said of the delay. “There are many reasons to try to pull us back if at all possible.”
Smrekar said the mission would work both with NASA Headquarters and the broader science community to try to reduce the delay. During the VEXAG meeting, participants discussed recommending to NASA that it either reduce the delay in VERITAS to 1 to 1.5 years or select a single Discovery mission, rather than two, in the next round of the program.
“We understand there are very big hurdles to doing this,” she said of shortening the mission’s delay, “but we will try to find a way.”
Quelle: SN
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Update: 7.04.2023
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Delays to NASA's VERITAS mission a major blow for Venus exploration
Three long awaited Venus missions were synced by design, until they weren't.
NASA's VERITAS mission is one of three missions that are expected to depart for Venus in the next decade.(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Delays to the first of three missions making the long awaited return to the scorching planet Venus, which scientists say has not had enough robotic visitors in the past decades, might affect the two other missions set to explore our planetary neighbor.
Late last year, NASA pushed the VERITAS (or Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy) mission, originally scheduled to fly in 2027 to inaugurate the "Decade of Venus," to no earlier than 2031. However, the White House's 2024 budget proposal for NASA, announced in March 2023, holds the mission funding for VERITAS at a mere $1.5 million per year for the near future, placing the mission in a "deep freeze." Because of NASA's decision to use a bulk of the funding that supported the project's engineering operations for other missions facing cost overruns, much of the work on the VERITAS mission is now at a standstill. Its indefinite delay has disbanded the mission's engineering wing, and scientists are now worrying about its impact on two other related missions to Venus.
"VERITAS has incredible synergy with the other missions," Stephen Kane, an astronomer at the University of California in Riverside, told Space.com.
VERITAS was supposed to be the first mission to return to Venus since NASA's Magellan spacecraft orbited it nearly 30 years ago. The spacecraft "will contribute foundational measurements needed for all types of Venus fundamental science," Darby Dyar, VERITAS' deputy principal investigator, told Space.com.
Some of those measurements, like mapping the surface of Venus with at at least a three-times better resolution than Magellan, were intended to support another NASA Venus mission— DAVINCI (or Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging).
Scheduled to reach Venus in early 2030s, DAVINCI will drop a probe into the planet's thick clouds that will make its way to the surface. Per the original plan, VERITAS would have already arrived at Venus prior to DAVINCI's launch, so scientists were hoping to use its data to select the best landing site for DAVINCI's probe. "The surface mapping provided by VERITAS would have been incredibly useful for fine-tuning the deployment of DAVINCI," Kane told Space.com.
Another mission originally intended to benefit from VERITAS data is EnVision, which is led by the European Space Agency (ESA) and scheduled to launch in the early 2030s to study the climate on Venus. Now, EnVision is scheduled to visit the planet around the same time that delayed VERITAS will arrive — if it survives NASA's budget issues.
This outcome is "less than ideal when the EnVision team was hoping to have the VERITAS data already in hand," Paul Byrne, an astronomy professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, told Space.com.
The parallel missions also means identical instruments on both missions would need to be built at the same time. For example, the German Aerospace Center (or DLR) is building the Venus Emissivity Mapper (VEM) for VERITAS and VenSpec-M for EnVision. Both instruments were meant to complement each other in surveying the planet's surface, so DLR had initially planned to build VERITAS' instrument first, and then those for EnVision.
"But with the current plan that DLR team might be building two copies of the instrument suite simultaneously," Byrne said. "That's going to put them under time and workforce pressure."
Scientists are also worried that having VERITAS and EnVision at Venus concurrently will result in less than ideal output for at least some of the expected science, including now having shorter than preferred timelines for detecting Venusian volcanoes.
For example, the VEM and VenSpec-M mapping instruments on both missions will look for active lava flows on the planet's surface, which could provide strong evidence that the planet is still volcanically active. Such findings will add to the recent discovery of an active volcano on Venus, which scientists found while sifting through 30-year-old data collected by NASA's Magellan spacecraft.
The discovery was possible because two images clicked eight months apart showed that a volcanic vent had grown noticeably larger and also changed its shape, reflecting recent volcanic activity. Scientists hope to find similar changes with upcoming missions, which is why the arrivals of VERITAS and EnVision were staggered initially, so that their data would complement each other.
"By delaying, we reduce the separation between VERITAS and EnVision." Darby told Space.com. "This will give a shorter timeline for detections."
While VERITAS' engineering team is currently standing down as directed by NASA, its science team is supported by limited funding of $1.5 million a year and continues to prepare for the mission while exploring ways to move the launch date to earlier than 2031.
Quelle: SC
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Update: 13.08.2023
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Instruments for NASA's VERITAS Venus mission get a test in Iceland
The German Aerospace Center (DLR), a VERITAS mission partner, is conducting instrument field tests in Iceland.
NASA's VERITAS Venus mission might be on hold, but team members continue to test out its gear here on Earth.
The German Aerospace Center (known by the German acronym DLR), a VERITAS mission partner, is conducting field tests in Iceland this summer, using its airborne F-SAR radar sensor and an infrared imager called V-EMulator to study lava flows. As Venus is expected to have a volcanic surface, the volcanic landscapes of Iceland serve as a strong analog for what VERITAS might find on our neighboring planet.
"Characterizing and measuring the extent and type of volcanic and tectonic processes on Venus is key to understanding the evolution of the surface of Venus and rocky planets in general," Sue Smrekar, the principal investigator for VERITAS at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement.
During two weeks of field operations, scientists and researchers from DLR and JPL will use the F-SAR radar system mounted on DLR's Dornier 228-212 aircraft to collect imaging data from Iceland's surface. Simultaneously, teams are collecting data and samples on the ground for laboratory analysis to supplement the radar data.
DLR is also testing V-EMulator, a prototype for the eventual Venus Emissivity Mapper that will be installed on VERITAS (whose name is short for "Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography And Spectroscopy").
"This will be of tremendous help to us in characterizing the mineralogical composition and origin of the major geologic terrains on the Venusian surface when VEM delivers 'true' Venus data during the mission phase," Solmaz Adeli, of DLR's Institute of Planetary Research, said in the same statement.
Radar image acquired by DLR's F-SAR sensor over the area of the recently erupted Litli-Hrutur volcano in Iceland. (Image credit: DLR
NASA intended VERITAS to launch in 2027, but due to institutional troubles at JPL, among other issues, the mission has been delayed indefinitely. It is expected that VERITAS might launch in the early 2030s, though mission funding has been reduced and further delays might occur.
The agency is also developing another Venus mission, called DAVINCI ("Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging"), which is scheduled to reach the planet in the early 2030s. Europe's EnVision probe, another Venus effort, is expected to get off the ground in that same general time frame as well.
As these three missions show, scientific interest in the second planet from the sun has surged over the past few years. Researchers increasingly view Venus as a possible abode for life, both in the ancient past and in the present day. Life as we know it cannot exist on the planet's scorching-hot surface today, but conditions about 30 miles (50 kilometers) up in the clouds are much more Earth-like.
Quelle: SC
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Update: 27.09.2023
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NASA's delayed VERITAS Venus mission tests key technology in Iceland
The field campaigns will help refine the VERITAS mission, which is expected to fly no earlier than 2031.
Members of the VERITAS science team descend a slope to new rock formed from a recent flow of lava during their Iceland field campaign in early August 2023. The team used the volcanic landscape as a Venus analog to test radar technologies and techniques. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
While NASA's VERITAS Venus mission continues to be on hold, team members have been perfecting technologies on Earth in places that resemble the hellish planet.
Early last month, one such field campaign took the mission's science team to a barren and rocky region in Iceland. There, they studied rocks and surfaces near an active volcano named Askja.
Such volcanic areas are being used as analogs of Venus to understand the different types of eruptions that may occur on its surface, and to test out various technologies and techniques to prepare for the VERITAS (or Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy) mission, which is not expected to launch sooner than 2031.
The VERITAS science team — which is being supported by a shoestring budget of $1.5 million until 2028, after NASA pulled the mission's funding earlier this year and disbanded its entire engineering wing — collected samples of young rocks and recent lava flows near the Askja volcano that will be analyzed in a lab, according to a NASA statement.
"Iceland is a volcanic country that sits atop a hot plume. Venus is a volcanic planet with plentiful geological evidence for active plumes," Suzanne Smrekar, senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and the VERITAS principal investigator, said in the same statement. "Its geological similarities make Iceland an excellent place to study Venus on Earth, helping the science team prepare for Venus."
During their campaign, the team also visited Fagradalsfjall in southwestern Iceland to collect more samples for further analysis, while an aircraft circling above captured radar images of the same area.
"We collected information in the field to ground-truth the radar data that we will use to inform the science that VERITAS will do at Venus," Daniel Nunes, the VERITAS deputy project scientist at JPL, said in the same statement.
Ultimately, these efforts will help in refining the algorithms onboard VERITAS to better identify changes on the surface of Venus since NASA's Magellan spacecraft circled the planet over 30 years ago, scientists say.
In March, a new analysis of Magellan's data showed changes of a vent near one of the planet's largest volcanoes named Maat Mons, raising hopes about the long-held suspicion that Venus is volcanically active.
While the recent discovery has helped spur interest in revisiting the planet, delays to the VERITAS mission, which was supposed to be the first Venus mission after Magellan and provide fundamental information about the planet and its surface, have put at least some of those potential discoveries on hold. NASA continues developing another Venus mission, called DAVINCI, which is scheduled to launch in 2029.
Quelle: SC
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Update: 9.11.2023
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VERITAS mission warns of risks of launch delay
WASHINGTON — The head of a delayed NASA mission to Venus has warned that the project risks losing critical expertise if the agency doesn’t find a way to move up the mission.
NASA selected the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy, or VERITAS, mission in 2021 as one of two Discovery-class missions to Venus, at the time planned for launch in the late 2020s. VERITAS would go into orbit around Venus and study the planet using several instruments, including a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imager.
However, the agency decided a year ago to delay the mission by three years, to no earlier than 2031, citing the findings of an review into delays of another NASA mission, Psyche, that found institutional problems at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The delay, NASA said, would address a “workforce imbalance” at JPL, which is the lead center for VERITAS, and free up funding needed to accommodate the Psyche delay.
At a meeting last week of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group, or VEXAG, the principal investigator for VERITAS argued that many of the issues that prompted the delay have been resolved. “Those issues are essentially behind us,” said Sue Smrekar of JPL, citing the launch in October of Psyche and progress on two other major JPL-led missions, Europa Clipper and the NISAR Earth science spacecraft, both on schedule for launches in 2024.
She said an extended delay, as still planned by NASA, threatened the personnel available for VERITAS, particular for its SAR instrument being developed at JPL. “There’s insufficient radar work at JPL. The radar workforce is really at threat,” she said. “It’s a really big technical threat for us.”
She noted that while NASA has provided some funding for VERITAS to maintain its science team, there was “zero support for engineering development” for the mission. That has led some engineering staff assigned to the mission to seek other work at JPL.
“We are losing our key team members all the time,” she said. “Over the dozen years it took us to get selected we developed a highly experienced, knowledgeable team, and they have to go take other jobs.”
The mission is studying launch opportunities for VERITAS in 2031 and 2032 as requested by NASA, but Smrekar said there was an earlier launch opportunity in November 2029 that was still feasible. An earlier launch would not only address the workforce concerns but also deconflict with two other Venus missions, NASA’s DAVINCI and ESA’s EnVision, arriving at Venus in the early 2030s.
“We can still make that opportunity if we get rolling in the next year,” she said of the November 2029 window.
The biggest challenge to that is available funding, which is facing difficulties from both overall budget pressures on the agency as well as cost growth on missions like Mars Sample Return. “It’s totally true that the budget is a mess, a disaster,” she acknowledged. “But that doesn’t mean that there’s no funding.”
A draft of the report accompanying the House version of a commerce, justice and science appropriations bill for fiscal year 2024, released last week by the House Appropriations Committee, does provide support for VERITAS. “The Committee recommends that NASA request sufficient funding to ensure a launch by the end of the decade,” it said of VERITAS, directing NASA to provide a budget profile “to ensure the mission can remain on track.”
“Our risk goes up the longer we are delayed and the longer we get no funding,” Smrekar said at the VEXAG meeting.
Quelle: SN
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Update: 29.11.2024
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VERITAS Venus mission seeks to avoid further delays
WASHINGTON — A NASA mission to Venus already delayed by three years because of institutional issues is seeking to avoid another delay of nearly a year and a half.
Work on the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy, or VERITAS, mission resumed in October after NASA directed the project to stand down in fiscal year 2024. NASA decided in 2023 to delay the mission to no earlier than 2031, a three-year slip, to address “workforce imbalance” problems at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lead center for VERITAS, found during the development of the Psyche asteroid mission.
While the mission’s leadership hoped to bring up the launch from 2031, Sue Smrekar, principal investigator for VERITAS, said at the recent annual meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG) is now working towards a launch in June 2031.
“VERITAS is standing up” after the pause in 2024, she said. “It feels really great to have engineering funding again to be moving forward.”
However, in her presentation at the meeting, she raised concerns that NASA might seek to further slip the launch. The next opportunity to launch VERITAS after June 2031 is November 2032. “There’s a real possibility of a further delay to ’32,” she said.
That slip, she argued, posed several challenges to the development and operations of the spacecraft. One of that the mission features several instruments contributed by the French, German and Italian space agencies, development of which continued while work paused on VERITAS itself. Further delays could put work on those instruments further out of phase with the main mission.
“Another delay would mean that those contributions would actually be delivered before the spacecraft goes into the preliminary design phase,” Smrekar said. “It increases the potential for disconnects.”
It also means, she said, that the personnel who worked on those instruments may not be available when it is time, years later, to integrate them onto the spacecraft. Those agencies are also involved with the European Space Agency’s EnVision mission to Venus, which, after the VERITAS delays, will now be developed roughly at the same time as VERITAS.
There are also potential conflicts between EnVision and VERITAS in operations. If VERITAS launches in 2031, it will be completing its aerobraking phase at Venus to enter its science orbit around the time that EnVision arrives, creating little conflict since EnVision will rely on NASA for supporting its own aerobraking phase. If VERITAS launches in late 2032, though, the two spacecraft will arrive within weeks of each other in 2033. “It would put a strain on the aerobraking team,” she said.
Smrekar said there would also be science impacts to a delayed launch. That includes not being able to observe with instruments some landing sites of other missions, including NASA’s DAVINCI spacecraft, which would allow scientists to calibrate the VERITAS data with the “ground truth” from those spacecraft.
Further delays also create the risk of losing key personnel who would move to other projects. “During that stand down, we lost a lot of key science team members,” she said. “The longer we get delayed, the more chance of losing key personnel.” That included, she added, one person who was laid off at JPL earlier in the month as part of lab-wide layoffs that affected 5% of its workforce.
While VERITAS works to avoid further delays, both DAVINCI and EnVision are pressing ahead. In a separate presentation at the VEXAG meeting, Thomas Widemann of the Paris Observatory said EnVision was still planning a launch in December 2031. ESA recently changed the launch vehicle for the mission from an Ariane 62 to an Ariane 64, with the extra performance intended to reduce the time the spacecraft spends in aerobraking once at Venus to enter its science orbit.
DAVINCI is looking at launch opportunities in fiscal years 2031 and 2032, said Stephanie Getty, deputy principal investigator for the mission, in another presentation. A preferred launch date is December 2030, she said, which is “scientifically amazing” in terms of providing images of key regions of Venus during two flybys of the planet before arriving in early 2033 to deposit a probe in the planet’s atmosphere.
Quelle: SN