A major mission to Venus has been put on hold.
The future of a major NASA mission to explore Venus hangs in the balance, threatening a promised renaissance forScientists are eager to send new missions to Venus in order to answer major questions they still have about the planet.Researchers think Venus could help shed light on whatPresident Biden's budget request for NASA — released on March 9 — dramatically pulls funding from the VERITAS mission to map Venus' surface from orbit.to just $1.5 million per year from 2024 through 2028.
"This isn't a scientific problem ... [or] a programmatic problem with managing various tasks," the Planetary Society's Casey Dreier tells Axios. "This is something completely unrelated, out of their control that they are suffering the consequences for."NASA officials have said the space agency is still committed to developing and launching VERITAS once other missions — like Europa Clipper, Psyche and NISAR — are cleared off the books at JPL.
"It suggests to everybody, not just in the Venus community, but to everybody in the planetary science community that NASA can arbitrarily cancel or delay missions that have already been selected," planetary volcanologist Tracy Gregg of the University of Buffalo tells Axios. "Even if we get the money back, it's gonna cost more than it would have in the first place because you can't just flip on and off a switch of building a spacecraft," Dreier said.Two other missions to Venus — NASA's DAVINCI+ probe to launch in the late 2020s and the European Space Agency's EnVision orbiter to launch in the early 2030s — are moving ahead as planned, but scientists stress that VERITAS is essential to their understanding of the planet.
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