The first private mission to Venus won’t launch this year after all.
The RocketLab mission, originally scheduled to launch last month, has been delayed until January 2025, TechCrunch reported.
“Our focus right now is on delivering customer missions as a priority,” a Rocket Lab spokesperson told the website, without offering a detailed explanation for the delay. January 2025 was the original backup launch window for Venus probe, according to MIT Technology Review.
Related: Here is every successful Venus mission launched by humanity
Rocket Lab announced it planned Venus mission in August 2020then stuffed its architecture into a paper published in the journal Aerospace two years later. The main goal is to probe the Venusian atmosphere to find the conditions necessary for life to exist.
Venus, the hottest planet in the solar system, is generally considered a hellscape, with surface temperatures enough heat to melt the lead. But some clues have emerged that suggest microbial life may exist high up in the skies of Venus, where conditions are more Earth-like.
In 2020, researchers discovered signs of phosphine in the clouds of Venus. This create quite a stirhere on Earth, this colorless, flammable toxic compound is found in swamps and other locations as a byproduct of microbial life.
“I’ve always felt like Venus gets a hard rap,” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said said last year while discussing the mission. “The discovery of phosphine was the catalyst. We need to go to Venus to look for life.”
The alleged Venus phosphine find – that’s a claim remains disputed today — helped renew scientific interest in the second planet from the sun. For example, NASA is working on two Venus missions, DAVINCI and VERITASscheduled to launch in the late 2020s and early 2030s.
The probe proposed by Rocket Lab, a California-based launch company, would reach Venus before NASA’s spacecraft and would also be cheaper. The mission is funded by Rocket Lab, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and undisclosed philanthropists and is estimated to cost only $10 million. This is only 1% of the estimated combined cost for both of NASA’s future Venus missions.
The probe will also be small, measuring 15 inches (38 centimeters) across, slightly larger than a basketball hoop, and weighing only 45 pounds (20.4 kilograms). The tiny Venus probe will leave Earth on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket and then be transported to the company’s hellish planet. Photon spacecraft bus.
The probe’s trip to Venus will be short, lasting just five months, but its data collection period will be even shorter. The probe will have only three to five minutes to collect data as it descends from an altitude of 37 to 28 miles (60 to 45 km) in Atmosphere of Venusthe region where scientists found signs of phosphine in 2020.
The probe won’t look for that chemical but will look for other complex organic molecules, measuring their composition, concentration and shapes during its nightmarish descent. This data will be returned land before the crushing pressure and blistering temperature on the surface of Venus destroy the probe.
The detection of organic molecules does not prove that there is microbial life in the clouds of Venus. But it may indicate that this hellish world is more hospitable than previously believed.
