Is there an institutional bias against exploring Venus at NASA? According to Scientific America, a group of scientists, seeing proposals to send robotic probes to the Second Rock from the sun rejected time and time again, seem to think so.
The last dedicated NASA mission to Venus was the Magellan, launched in 1989. It orbited Venus and used a radar mapping system to penetrate the planet's cloud cover to create a topographical map of its surface. The European Space Agency has sent the Venus Express. Aside from flybys of probes going to other planets, such as Galileo, Cassini and Messenger, Magellan and Venus Explorer have been it since the golden age of Venus exploration, largely driven by the Soviet Union, in the 1960s and 1970s.
Part of the problem may be that Venus is a Hell-world, whose surface temperature is about 900 degrees and an atmospheric pressure of 92 times that of Earth's. Hence, astronauts are not going to visit Venus anytime soon. Indeed, conditions are so extreme on Venus's surface that robotic probes only last a few hours at most before succumbing.
It is not that Venus is an uninteresting world. Hundreds of millions of years ago, Venus's atmosphere is thought to have been similar to Earth's, with liquid water on its surface, and perhaps even life. It is theorized that a runaway greenhouse effect helped to create the Venus that exists today.
If materials could be developed so robotic probes could survive more than a handful of hours, surface exploration of Venus could become more practical. But as of right now, with money for any kind of space exploration limited, it is only natural that NASA would concentrate on destinations, such as the moon, Mars and asteroids, that are more accessible than the surface of Venus.
Also, Venus very likely does not have any form of life on its surface. Life is the holy grail of NASA robotic exploration, which means Mars and even some of the moons of the Outer Planets, such as Europa orbiting Jupiter and Titan orbiting Saturn, have an advantage over Venus.
Still, there should be room for at least another Venus orbiter that would carry instruments to examine that planet's atmosphere, the better to understand the runaway greenhouse effect that transformed it from a virtual twin of Earth to the hellish place that it is in modern times. Venus as an atmospheric laboratory would help scientists to understand Earth's atmosphere and the processes that affect it.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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