Meet Calypso, a daredevil mission concept to explore the surface of Venus

[Admin]

Of all the rocky, inner worlds of the solar system, Venus is the most challenging to explore.

Meet Calypso, a daredevil mission concept to explore the surface of Venus : Read more

 

[Lovethrust]

I fervently wish they would do this! I’m sick of Venus being ignored when it comes to probes. Of course they will probably shelve this mission for another one to Mars...

 

[mbee1]

Unless you have a good tether this is simply a boondoggle. We have a bunch of moon lander and mars lander mission which are higher priority if the taxpayers want something back for their money. 20 miles of tether is a long long long rope. Given the atmosphere a carbon rope might work assuming the chemistry would not eat it up but it would still weigh a lot and require a very large balloon to hold it up. Nobody has built a rope made of carbon more than a few feet long much less twenty plus miles. Given the weight , you are looking at a very large booster in the saturn V range to launch the balloon and the rest to Venus. Program cost would be in the billions.

 

[MeS]

Unless you have a good tether this is simply a boondoggle. We have a bunch of moon lander and mars lander mission which are higher priority if the taxpayers want something back for their money. 20 miles of tether is a long long long rope. Given the atmosphere a carbon rope might work assuming the chemistry would not eat it up but it would still weigh a lot and require a very large balloon to hold it up. Nobody has built a rope made of carbon more than a few feet long much less twenty plus miles. Given the weight , you are looking at a very large booster in the saturn V range to launch the balloon and the rest to Venus. Program cost would be in the billions.

I can buy a carbon fiber cable much longer than "a few feet." The breaking length of several materials exceeds 20 miles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_strength). Most innovative extraplanetary probes cost billions.

We don't get anywhere by giving up before we're actually defeated.

 

[Sontzx]

Of all the rocky, inner worlds of the solar system, Venus is the most challenging to explore.

Meet Calypso, a daredevil mission concept to explore the surface of Venus : Read more

I wonder what it would cost to put a parasol at Vanuis' L1 blocking solar radiation from Venus? And how long would it take for Venus to cool down to the pont where we could land on the surface at a temp in roughly Earth range?

 

[Lovethrust]

I wonder what it would cost to put a parasol at Vanuis' L1 blocking solar radiation from Venus? And how long would it take for Venus to cool down to the pont where we could land on the surface at a temp in roughly Earth range?

I doubt it ever would even with a huge parasol. There is so much heat trapped there...