VESPER

Vesper, the Latin name for "Evening Star" or Venus, is a proposed NASA Discovery-class mission that would increase our knowledge of what the planet's atmosphere is made of and how it changes.

The Vesper proposal was among approximately two dozen submitted in response to NASA's Discovery Program 2006 Announcement of Opportunity in April. NASA selected three new mission proposals for concept studies, including Vesper. As a new mission, the Vesper team will receive $1.2 million to conduct further study of the concept. If selected for continuation beyond the concept phase, Vesper must complete its mission, including archiving and analyzing data, for less than $425 million.

If approved, Vesper would observe Venus for two days. They are Venus days, which are 243 Earth days long. Venus rotates so slowly that its day is longer than its year (which lasts 224.7 Earth days).

The many mysteries Vesper will investigate include:

• How the atmosphere evolved from a supposed Earthlike beginning to its current, unimaginably hostile state. Understanding what happened can provide insight to climate change on Earth.
• Although the surface hardly rotates, the cloud tops swirl around the planet at over 200 miles per hour. This is called "superrotation," and scientists want to understand what drives it.
• Vortices of spinning clouds resembling twin hurricanes, side by side, exist at each pole. Scientists want to understand how and why they form, and whether they produce unusual chemical reactions, similar to the polar vortices on Earth that set up conditions which allow the ozone holes to form.
• Vesper will also investigate whether long-term changes in atmospheric sulfur dioxide compounds are evidence of active volcanoes on Venus.
• The planet's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide (CO2), which should get broken down by sunlight into carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen. That's not happening, at least not on a large scale, or scientists would have seen it by now. There must be some as yet unknown chemistry stabilizing the atmosphere.

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Samuel Gulkis Astrophysics & Space Science Read More >>