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ISRO - Venus Orbiter (Shukrayaan) - December 2024
by
sanman
on 11 Nov, 2018 20:53
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#1
by
Phillip Clark
on 11 Nov, 2018 21:28
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What a surprise that India is planning a Venus mission in 2023 when the Chinese have already announced that their first mission to the planet is scheduled for 2024.
The nominal launch windows are June 2023 and December 2024-January 2025.
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#2
by
sanman
on 11 Nov, 2018 21:50
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Gee, I'd no idea they were also doing one - is there a thread for that? I seriously doubt ISRO would be looking to match China's moves on Venus - Moon and Mars yes, but Venus just doesn't seem that important for space colonization. Late Indian president Dr Abdul Kalam said the Earth, Moon and Mars were naturally a single industrial complex, but Venus doesn't seem to have the same potential. Elon Musk calls Mars a "fixer upper" planet, but Venus is a much harder case to make. Venus doesn't capture popular imagination nearly as much as Mars does. So a Venus mission seems to only be useful for gathering scientific data on the place. Notice that MOM-2 is scheduled ahead of Shukrayaan.
But as per the 2nd link above, there was speculation on whether this mission might involve aerocapture, because of input from Jacques Blamont of CNES. Perhaps aerocapture seems too ambitious for a first mission, and would be suitable for some follow-on mission. It does seem noteworthy that ISRO scaled back its original payload requirement from 175kg to 100kg. Are they looking to allocate payload mass for something else? If Dr Kalam were alive, he'd definitely be advocating some kind of impactor probe, because if you're taking all that trouble to go there, then you might as well touch the planet itself.
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#3
by
K210
on 12 Nov, 2018 00:46
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What a surprise that India is planning a Venus mission in 2023 when the Chinese have already announced that their first mission to the planet is scheduled for 2024.
The nominal launch windows are June 2023 and December 2024-January 2025.
ISRO originally planned their venus mission for 2015. The 2023 date is only a result of delays and poor funding nothing more. We are not in a race with anyone.
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#4
by
Steven Pietrobon
on 12 Nov, 2018 03:35
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#5
by
TheVarun
on 14 Nov, 2018 14:49
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ISRO originally planned their venus mission for 2015. The 2023 date is only a result of delays and poor funding nothing more. We are not in a race with anyone.
Well said. ISRO/India doesn't see space as a boxing ring or a racetrack. India doesn't( at the very least, would rather not) see any industry or science that way. India will promote and defend its specific interests in an ethical and practical manner, that's all.
Indulging a bit..India's space programme has always been a very civilian controlled and civilian oriented one. The idea is to employ space tech for infrastructural( telecom, I&B etc) meterological and scientific purposes. The military and strategic dimensions came much later, and are a small part of the enterprise. The other major space programmes originated in military and geo-strategic compulsions, and in the desire for prestige. China has been for many years, trying to show how great and mighty it is with its space programme, ISRO should never get into that bombastic pomposity.
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#6
by
sanman
on 14 Nov, 2018 16:23
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As with Chandrayaan-1, ISRO is inviting international payloads for this Venus mission:
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/isro-plans-venus-mission-for-2023-invites-international-payloads/story-nlAa8f9A0i1ZpJs4kETSdO.htmlIndia will send 12 scientific payloads aboard the satellite for the Venus mission, including a thermal camera, mass spectrometer and cloud monitoring camera. The final spacecraft is likely to have a payload capacity of close to 100 kg, with 500W of power, according to the Isro website.The satellite is likely to be launched into a highly-inclined orbit of 500x60,000 km around Venus. The apoapsis, or the point when the satellite is furthest away from Venus, will gradually reduce over several months. Venus is considered to be Earth’s “twin sister” because of similarities in size, mass, density, composition and gravity. The mission will focus on studying the surface and the sub-surface of the planet, atmospheric chemistry, and the interactions with solar radiation or solar winds.
The figure of 500 W seems a bit low, doesn't it? After all, there's quite a lot of solar flux to be had around Venus.
Is there any reason to believe that the solar power system would be smaller for this Shukrayaan/Venus mission than it was for the Mangalyaan/Mars orbiter?
But so once again, it seems like the probe will go for a highly elongated elliptical orbit to get in around Venus. Will this maneuver be less of a nail-biter than the Mars one?
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#7
by
sanman
on 21 Nov, 2018 20:56
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ISRO may be planning a balloon mission on its maiden voyage to Venus:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/india-seeks-collaborators-mission-venus-neglected-planetIndia seeks collaborators for a mission to Venus, the neglected planet
By Pallava BaglaNov. 21, 2018 , 3:30 PM
NEW DELHI—The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bengaluru will send an orbiter to Venus in 2023 and has invited scientists from around the world to submit proposals for instruments to carry along. The plan, which will include a balloon dropped into the planet’s atmosphere, has received a warm welcome from Venus scientists, many of whom feel that, compared with the moon and Mars, their planet has received short shrift in the past 2 decades.
The as-yet-unnamed spacecraft is likely to weigh 2500 kilograms and may have a 100-kilogram payload; it will be launched on India’s heaviest rocket, the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. The orbiter will initially be placed in a large elliptical orbit around Venus that is gradually shrunk.
Like Earth, Venus is some 4.5 billion years old; the planets are of similar size and mass. But Venus has witnessed a runaway greenhouse phenomenon, leading to a dense, carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere that may offer scientists clues about the development of Earth’s atmosphere. “Planetary comparative climatology is an area of continued interest and research. The opportunity to explore Venus together is welcome,” says Lori Glaze, acting head of NASA’s planetary science division in Washington, D.C.
Venus is a hostile planet to study: Its thick clouds make research from an orbiter difficult, while heat, high pressure, and sulfuric acid droplets make descending to the surface a technological nightmare. Of the more than 40 Venus missions so far, roughly half have failed, and only a handful spacecraft have touched down on the planet’s surface.
That’s why the crowd gathered at a meeting of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group in Laurel, Maryland, was “very excited” to hear India’s call for collaboration on 6 November, says Patrick McGovern of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. “In the absence of new Venus missions and data, it is increasingly difficult to generate support for students and early-career researchers interested in Venus,” he says. That keeps the Venus community small, which “in turn affects the ability to rally support for new missions,” McGovern says. “In my view we are presently at the reconnaissance stage of [Venus] exploration, equivalent to that of pre-1997 Mars.”
“Planetary exploration should be all about global partnerships,” says Indian Space Research Organisation chair Kailasavadivoo Sivan.
ISRO has already selected 12 instruments, proposed by Indian scientists, including cameras and chemical analyzers to study the atmosphere. Now, it’s hoping other scientists will join. “Planetary exploration should be all about global partnerships,” says Kailasavadivoo Sivan, a rocket scientist and ISRO’s chair. (The deadline for submitting proposals is 20 December.)
McGovern hopes to send a radar instrument that could penetrate the thick clouds and make sharper maps of the surface, which could help address questions remaining after NASA’s 1989 Magellan mission to Venus. Planetary scientist Larry Esposito of the University of Colorado in Boulder says he’d like to contribute instruments that would study the planet’s atmosphere. He’s particularly interested in Venus’s clouds and how they could be responding to possible ongoing volcanic eruptions. “The past ISRO missions provide confidence,” Esposito says. (India visited the moon in 2008 and Mars in 2014; it has another moon mission scheduled next year and a new visit to Mars in 2022.)
Astrophysicist Jacques Blamont, a former head of France’s National Center for Space Studies in Paris, several years ago proposed producing metallic balloons that could dip in and out of Venus’s hot atmosphere to study its chemistry. ISRO has adopted that idea, says Sivan, but will develop the balloon in-house. It will carry 10 kilograms of instruments and float down to 55 kilometers above the surface.
So it seems like a balloon mission is on the cards. That sounds like something interesting and novel - has anybody attempted anything like this before?
Should ISRO be attempting something this ambitious on their first trip to Venus?
On the other hand, people here have in the past said that Venus aerocapture is relatively straightforward.
How long could a mylar balloon last, while supporting a ~10kg instrument payload?
It sounds like it would be cycling up and down as it alternately gets heated and then cooled.
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#8
by
Phillip Clark
on 21 Nov, 2018 21:18
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So it seems like a balloon mission is on the cards? That sounds like something interesting and novel - has anybody attempted anything like this before?
The first balloons were deployed in the venerian atmosphere by the Soviet VEGA missions in 1985.
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#9
by
sanman
on 21 Nov, 2018 21:38
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The first balloons were deployed in the venerian atmosphere by the Soviet VEGA missions in 1985.
Ah, that's right - thank you for that - these were the twin Vega spacecraft missions that Prof Blamont was involved with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program
The two balloon aerobots were designed to float at 54 km from the surface, in the most active layer of the Venusian cloud system. The instrument pack had enough battery power for sixty hours of operation and measured temperature, pressure, wind speed and aerosol density. The balloon envelopes were surfaced with polytetrafluoroethylene to resist attack by the corrosive atmosphere. Both Vega-1 and Vega-2 balloons operated for more than 46 hrs from injection to the final transmission.[1]
The balloons were spherical superpressure types with a diameter of 3.54 metres (11.6 ft) and filled with helium. A gondola assembly weighing 6.9 kilograms (15.2 pounds) and 1.3 meters (4.26 ft) long was connected to the balloon envelope by a tether 13 metres (42.6 ft) long. Total mass of the entire assembly was 21 kilograms (46 pounds).
The top section of the gondola assembly was capped by a conical antenna 37 centimetres (14.6 inches) tall and 13 centimetres (5 1⁄8 inches) wide at the base. Beneath the antenna was a module containing the radio transmitter and system control electronics. The lower section of the gondola assembly carried the instrument payload and batteries.
The instruments consisted of:
An arm carrying thin-film resistance thermometers and a velocity anemometer. The anemometer consisted of a free-spinning plastic propeller whose spin was measured by LED-photodetector optointerrupters.
A module containing a PIN diode photodetector to measure light levels and a vibrating quartz beam pressure sensor.
A package at the bottom carrying the batteries and a nephelometer to measure cloud density through light reflection.
The small low-power transmitter only allowed a data transmission rate of 2,048 bits/sec, though the system performed data compression to squeeze more information through the narrow bandwidth. Nonetheless, the sampling rate for most of the instruments was only once every 75 seconds. The balloons were tracked by two networks of 20 radio telescopes in total back on Earth: the Soviet network, coordinated by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and the international network, coordinated by Centre national d'études spatiales of France (CNES).
The balloons were dropped onto the planet's darkside and deployed at an altitude of about 50 kilometres (31 mi). They then floated upward a few kilometres to their equilibrium altitude. At this altitude, pressure and temperature conditions of Venus are similar to those of Earth, though the planet's winds moved at hurricane velocity and the carbon dioxide atmosphere is laced with sulfuric acid, along with smaller concentrations of hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid.
The balloons moved swiftly across the night side of the planet into the light side, where their batteries finally ran down and contact was lost. Tracking indicated that the motion of the balloons included a surprising vertical component, revealing vertical motions of air masses that had not been detected by earlier probe missions.
So the balloons used for Vega were not metallic-coated/mylar type, and did not do any up-and-down cycling.
If another new balloon mission were to be done, would the balloon just end up being whipped around to the night side and get frozen there? Is it possible to design a photo-voltaic balloon for this mission that would somehow last longer?
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2008/09/Wind_circulation_on_Venus
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#10
by
sanman
on 22 Nov, 2018 04:14
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Just pondering the balloon instrument power issue some more. Maybe the mylar balloon could be coated with thin-film photovoltaics to generate power from the famously strong solar flux in the skies above Venus?
Or if photovoltaics aren't possible for the balloon package, could a rectenna be used to receive power beamed down from the orbiter itself?
Or, if the balloon is able to make use of liquid-gas phase transitions, could that somehow be used to generate electrical power, perhaps via a tiny micro-turbine?
Saw some commentary here about some proposed missions:
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14091/how-long-would-a-blimp-last-in-venusian-atmosphere-at-an-altitude-of-65-km
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#11
by
Tywin
on 11 Jun, 2019 00:17
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#12
by
zubenelgenubi
on 14 Nov, 2019 03:39
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Cross-post:
During IAC2019 in Washington DC I spoke with S Somanath (Director of VSSC) and R Umamaheswaran (Scientific Secretary) from ISRO on Thursday 24th October.
...
The 50 min audio interview is available here https://astrotalkuk.org/?p=5703
<snip>
- Shukrayaan-1 (Venus mission) still targeted for 2023.
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#13
by
otter
on 06 Nov, 2020 06:36
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#14
by
otter
on 06 Nov, 2020 06:42
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Slide from the webinar ′Franco-Indian space cooperation, history and perspectives′, launch date indicated — Dec 2024
https://twitter.com/Astro_Danyboy/status/1324062302191210498Rouquette: provision of operational support skills for the management of operations (monitoring of operations, psychology and emergencies). Several visits to Cadmos planned in the program.
Pierre Bousquet: the ISRO roadmap is completely logical in the exploration of the solar system: Moon, Mars: now Venus with the Shukrayaan mission, and CNES is a partner with the detector for the on-board IR spectrometer with the IKI . Mission scheduled for 2024.
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#15
by
sanman
on 20 Nov, 2020 03:01
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India’s Shukrayaan orbiter to study Venus for over four years, launches in 2024,
SN, November 19
Shukrayaan will be the first mission to map Venus’ subsurface
MUMBAI, India — India’s space agency aims to launch its Venus orbiter Shukrayaan in late 2024, more than a year later than previously planned, an ISRO research scientist told a NASA-chartered planetary science planning committee Nov. 10.
T. Maria Antonita of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) detailed the status of the mission to scientists drafting a new 10-year plan for NASA’s planetary science program. Shukrayaan will be India’s first mission to Venus and will study the planet for more than four years.
[zubenelgenubi: Full copy/paste, almost full copy/paste, or extensive quotation, of copyrighted material (such as this magazine article) is prohibited. Short quotes are ok.
Senior members should know this.]
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#16
by
zubenelgenubi
on 13 Jul, 2021 21:45
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Very belated cross-post:
YouTube presentation dated August 3, 2020
YT link in the original post
Relevant slide attached
"An Evening with Dr. S. Somanath, Director, VSSC, Trivandrum"
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#17
by
deadman1204
on 14 Jul, 2021 13:55
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so cool, I didn't know anything about this.
Does anyone know where they are in mission formulation?
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#18
by
vyoma
on 13 Aug, 2021 02:43
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https://spl.gov.in/SPL/index.php/psb-researchIn terms of instrumentation, presently PSB is focussing on the scientific payloads like ... Venus Ionospheric and Solar Wind Analyser (VISWAS), Venus Ionospheric Plasma wavE detectoR (VIPER), VEnus THermosphere Ionosphere Composition Analyser(VETHICA), Venus Electron Temperature Analyser (VETA) for the upcoming Venus Mission.
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#19
by
vyoma
on 13 Aug, 2021 02:44
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