Recently, many space agencies across the world have planned interplanetary missions, and ISRO is one of them. After ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 mission, the Indian space agency is keener to explore the universe. From exploring the Sun to stepping on Venus, ISRO plans to do it all. The Indian national government is hoping they’ll get approval to go ahead with the ISRO’s Venus mission and will launch a spacecraft in just a few years that would carry more than a dozen instruments.
Nigar Shaji, an ISRO scientist, told a group of Venus experts during a meeting held this week in Colorado –
The major objective is to map the Venusian surface and subsurface
Facts about Venus
- Venus is the second planet from the sun.
- In ancient times, Venus was often thought to be two different stars, the morning star and the evening star.
- Further observations of Venus in the space age show a very hellish environment, consisting mainly of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid.
- Venus and Earth are similar in mass, size, density, composition, and gravity.
- Venus is the hottest world in the solar system.
- The surface of Venus is extremely dry.
To dig deeper into the planet the Venus orbiter that ISRO designed would be able to create a dataset for Venus in about a year and help scientists identify volcanic hotspots scattered across Venus. As Shaji said, the spacecraft would also study the planet’s atmosphere and ionosphere and how Venus interacts with the surrounding environment.
As per ISRO’s website, the proposed satellite would weigh around 175 kg with 500W of power, but these values will be further tuned based on the final configuration. ISRO’s Venus mission is expected to launch in June 2023 on one of ISRO’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicles.
