An architecture program for the robotic exploration of Venus
To date, most space exploration has focused on the solar system beyond Earth's orbit while the inner solar system between Earth and the Sun has received only limited attention. In this region, Venus, with a similar size and mass to Earth but with a very different environment, is probably the most interesting body. The most notable feature of Venus is the extreme runaway greenhouse effect. This phenomenon is considered a potential fate for the Earth in the future. Exploring Venus could help mitigate this threat. However, the environment of Venus is sufficiently challenging as to preclude the possibility of physical human presence for the foreseeable future. Consequently, robot-mediated exploration is required
Reassessing the possibility of life on venus: proposal for an astrobiology mission.
With their similar size, chemical composition, and distance from the Sun, Venus and Earth may have shared a similar early history. Though surface conditions on Venus are now too extreme for life as we know it, it likely had abundant water and favorable conditions for life when the Sun was fainter early in the Solar System. Given the persistence of life under stabilizing selection in static environments, it is possible that life could exist in restricted environmental niches, where it may have retreated after conditions on the surface became untenable. High-pressure subsurface habitats with water in the supercritical liquid state could be a potential refugium, as could be the zone of dense cloud cover where thermoacidophilic life might have retreated. Technology based on the Stardust Mission to collect comet particles could readily be adapted for a pass through the appropriate cloud layer for sample collection and return to Earth.
STARDUST: finessing expensive cometary sample returns.
The STARDUST Discovery mission will collect samples of cometary coma and interstellar dust and return them to Earth. Five years after launch in February 1999, coma dust in the 1- to 100-micrometers size range will be captured by impact into ultra-low-density silica aerogel during a 6 kms-1 flyby of Comet Wild 2. The returned samples will be investigated at laboratories where the most critical information on these primitive materials is retained. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will provide project management with Lockheed Martin Astronauts as the spacecraft industrial partner. STARDUST management will aggressively and innovatively achieve cost control through the use of Total Quality Management principles, the chief of which will be organization in a Project Engineering and Integration Team that "flattens" the traditional hierarchical structure by including all project elements from the beginning, in a concurrent engineering framework focusing on evolving Integrated Mission Capability.