The coming Venus mission will employ two pieces of Rocket Lab hardware — the 57-foot-tall (17 meters)
Electron booster, which has been launching small satellites to orbit since early 2018, and the Photon satellite bus, which
made its spaceflight debut on an Electron mission late last month.
A Photon will launch atop an Electron, then make its way to Venus on a flyby trajectory. When the Photon gets close, it will deploy a probe into the Venusian atmosphere. This won't be the first Photon trip beyond Earth orbit, by the way; NASA has booked Electron and Photon to
fly a small satellite to the moon in early 2021.
"The probe is targeted at kind of an entry angle that maximizes the amount of time in that 50-kilometer[-high] region of interest," Beck said. Though the Venus entry probe will be "coming in super-hot" at about 24,600 mph (39,600 km/h), "we do get a reasonable amount of time in that really interesting zone," he added.
The probe won't be balloon-borne, like the Soviet Venera missions that plied the Venusian skies in the 1980s. It will be more akin to the four small descent craft successfully deployed into the Venus atmosphere by NASA's
Pioneer Venus Multiprobe mission in 1978, Beck said.
"We're taking a lot of inspiration from some of that probe design," he said.
The goal is to hunt for signs of life in the potentially habitable patch of Venus air. And Rocket Lab is already talking to scientists about the best ways to do this — including members of the team who spotted phosphine in the planet's clouds. (To be clear: This phosphine is a potential, not confirmed, sign of
alien life. More work is needed to determine what processes are generating the gas.)
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