WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab expects to launch a highly anticipated privately funded mission to Venus at the tip of 2024, leveraging its experience from a mission to the moon.
Speaking at a gathering of the Venus Exploration Evaluation Group, or VEXAG, Oct. 29, Christopher Mandy, lead system engineer for Rocket Lab’s interplanetary missions, said the corporate has set a launch date of Dec. 30, 2024, for the launch of the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus.
The mission, also called the Venus Life Finder, will send a small spacecraft to Venus. A probe will separate and enter the planet’s atmosphere, equipped with a single instrument, an autofluorescence nephelometer, to detect the presence of organic compounds in droplets within the planet’s clouds. The mission is the primary in a series proposed by scientists on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to search for evidence of life within the atmosphere of Venus.
Rocket Lab has been collaborating with MIT and others on the mission, which relies on private funding. The mission was at one time projected to launch in May 2023, but the corporate delayed it because it worked on other priorities. “The Venus mission is a nights-and-weekends project,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview in April. “It gets pushed to the side on a regular basis, but we’re still working on it.”
Mandy said the corporate is making good progress on the mission. “We’re getting various components from external vendors,” he said, including a thermal protection system for the probe provided by NASA’s Ames Research Center and the fundamental instrument from Droplet Measurement Technologies. Delivery of each is anticipated by the tip of the yr, allowing assembly, integration and testing of the spacecraft to happen next yr.
The present schedule calls for a launch Dec. 30, although Mandy didn’t disclose the length of the launch period for the mission. An Electron rocket will place the 315-kilogram spacecraft into low Earth orbit, where it is going to perform a series of orbit raising maneuvers leading as much as a lunar flyby to send the spacecraft to Venus. That schedule would have the spacecraft arrive at Venus on May 13, 2025.
The probe will separate from the cruise stage and collect data for about five minutes because it descends through the clouds within the planet’s upper atmosphere. The spacecraft will then transmit the info it collected for 20 minutes before it reaches an altitude of about 22 kilometers, where the atmosphere pressure reaches 20 atmospheres, the limit the probe is designed to face up to. Internal temperatures will even reach the bounds the electronics can withstand at the identical time, he said.
The mission is designed to leverage the hardware and mission design used for CAPSTONE, the NASA-funded lunar mission launched on an Electron in June 2022 using a cruise stage called Lunar Photon. “It’s the identical bus because the bus that was designed and built and launched for the CAPSTONE mission,” he said. “Being privately funded and attempting to stay low price, we’re reusing lots of designs that exist already, minimizing the quantity of engineering we’d like to do.”
While the MIT scientists have plans for later, more ambitious missions, the Venus probe is primarily an indication for Rocket Lab. “Rocket Lab itself currently doesn’t have any ambitions of funding other missions,” he said. “We’re hoping that, by demonstrating that this is feasible, we’d have the option to trigger more interest. The associated fee of this mission could be significantly lower than what’s typical, so which may encourage governmental bodies to support this type of mission.”
Amongst those in attendance on the VEXAG meeting was Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “The rise in the aptitude is improbable for everybody,” she said of the planned mission. “I’m really looking forward to the Rocket Lab launch.”
Rocket Lab has not disclosed the price of the mission, for which it’s contributing the launch, cruise stage and entry probe, but would likely fit inside NASA’s smallest class of planetary science missions, called SIMPLEx, with a current cost cap of $55 million. Nevertheless, Glaze said NASA is deferring calls for future SIMPLEx missions due to constrained budgets.