The comeback of VERITAS is even more striking.
“VERITAS is now funded with a launch date of November 2032, so this is great news for us,” said Dan Nunes, the mission’s deputy project scientist at JPL. “We’re staffing up. We’re accelerating, not to the point of Jim’s acceleration [on DAVINCI], but we’re moving.”
VERITAS is targeted to launch the month after DAVINCI arrives at Venus. “It keeps building on momentum for Venus science, which is great,” Nunes said. “We’re going to arrive at Venus close to the middle of 2033, and we’re going to have a phase of aerobraking” before beginning routine science observations.
In recent months, engineers working on the DAVINCI mission completed experiments showing how the Venus probe’s cameras and instruments will capture data during its one-shot descent through the atmosphere. It will take about an hour for DAVINCI’s battery-powered titanium descent craft to travel from space to the surface of Venus, and all of its imagery and data must be relayed to Earth through a radio link with DAVINCI’s carrier spacecraft before it goes over the horizon.
“We have to optimize everything in the final eight to 10 minutes of descent as we come into the supercritical atmosphere to get this data back for all of us to work with,” Garvin said.
The DAVINCI team also recently subjected a prototype of the entry probe to the extreme temperatures it will see at Venus. The insulated sphere kept its internal components below 86° Fahrenheit (30° Celsius), meeting requirements. DAVINCI’s managers at Goddard reported results from these two tests to NASA Headquarters and Administrator Jared Isaacman, and to the White House, Garvin said.
The news is similarly positive for VERITAS, according to Nunes, who credited scientific advocacy groups for the mission’s survival.
“VERITAS is going,” Nunes said. “We would like to thank all the support from the community, from VEXAG, the Planetary Society, all those people that went out there and made the case for Venus exploration for keeping VERITAS alive and getting us a launch date, so we’re very thankful for that.”