Even more remarkable is the comeback of VERITAS.
“VERITAS is now funded with a launch date of November 2032, so that’s great news for us,” said Dan Nunes, mission deputy project scientist at JPL. “We’re increasing staff. We’re accelerating, not as much as Jim’s acceleration [on DAVINCI]but we’re moving.”
VERITAS is scheduled to launch a month after DAVINCI arrives on Venus. “It continues to build on the momentum of Venus science, which is great,” Nunes said. “We will arrive on Venus around mid-2033 and undergo a period of air braking” before beginning routine scientific observations.
In recent months, engineers on the DAVINCI mission have completed experiments that show how the Venus probe’s cameras and instruments will collect data during its one-time descent through the atmosphere. It will take about an hour for DAVINCI’s battery-powered Titan descent craft to travel from space to the surface of Venus, and all of its images and data must be relayed to Earth via a radio link with DAVINCI’s carrier spacecraft before it flies over the horizon.
“We have to optimize everything in the last eight to 10 minutes of descent when we get into the supercritical atmosphere to get that data back so we can all work with it,” Garvin said.
The DAVINCI team also recently exposed a prototype entry probe to the extreme temperatures that will prevail on Venus. The insulated sphere kept its internal components below 30° Celsius (86° Fahrenheit), meeting requirements. DAVINCI managers at Goddard reported the results of these two tests to NASA Headquarters and Administrator Jared Isaacman as well as the White House, Garvin said.
For VERITAS, the news was similarly positive, said Nunes, who blamed scientific stakeholders for the mission’s survival.
“VERITAS is going,” Nunes said. “We want to thank the entire community, VEXAG, the Planetary Society, all the people who went out there and committed to exploring Venus, to keeping VERITAS alive and giving us a launch date. We are very grateful for that.”
