Venus Origins Explorer New Frontiers Proposal

[Flyaway]

When I wrote my blog post on the New Frontiers mission proposals, I could identify eleven of the twelve proposals. One, though, then had no public trace. Shortly after my piece was published, several people emailed me to tell me that the twelfth proposal was a third Venus mission called the Venus Origins eXplorer (VOX). However, they offered no details on its implementation.

The VOX proposal takes an entirely different approach. As the abstract states, “At the time of the Decadal Survey the ability to map mineralogy from orbit and present-day radar techniques to detect active [surface] deformation were not fully appreciated. VOX leverages these methods and in-situ noble gases to answer [the key] New Frontiers science objectives.”

The VOX mission would deploy a small, simple atmospheric probe to make the measurements of the key gases and isotopes. The rest of the measurements would be made from instruments on an orbiter, much as the Juno mission uses orbital measurements to replace measurements from atmospheric probes. (The composition measurements for Jupiter that could only be made from within an atmosphere had already been made by the Galileo mission’s atmospheric probe.)

http://futureplanets.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/venus-origins-explorer-new-frontiers.html?m=1