Latest news with #HeatshieldforExtremeEntryEnvironmentTechnology
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The 1st private mission to Venus comes together ahead of possible 2026 launch (photos)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley report progress in installing a heat shield on the first private spacecraft targeted for Venus. Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California, is leading the effort, along with their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. NASA's Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) was invented at the NASA Ames center. NASA's Small Spacecraft Technology program, part of the agency's Space Technology Mission Directorate, supported the development of the heat shield for Rocket Lab's Venus mission. HEET is a textured material covering the bottom of the capsule, a woven heat shield designed to protect spacecraft from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2482 degrees Celsius). The private Venus probe would be deployed from Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft bus. This probe will take measurements as it descends through the clouds of Venus. "We missed our January 2025 launch window and now wait until the next one summer 2026," said MIT's Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and leader of the Morningstar Missions to Venus team – a series of planned missions designed to investigate the possibility of life in Venus' clouds. Related Stories: — NASA's Europa Clipper will fly close to Mars today on way to Jupiter's icy moon — Did alien life exist in hot water on Mars billions of years ago? — NASA's Curiosity Mars rover discovers evidence of ripples from an ancient Red Planet lake (images) The first mission, a collaboration with Rocket Lab, is the small, low-cost probe designed to measure autofluorescence and backscattered polarized radiation to detect the presence of organic molecules in the clouds. That spacecraft is now going on Rocket Lab's yet-to-fly Neutron booster, instead of an Electron launcher, so the private Venus mission is tied to the Neutron coming online, Seager told Inside Outer Space. "On my side, we completed the instrument build and had our first integration tests with the probe, the part that will be dropped off into the Venus atmosphere. All is progressing," said Seager.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA Installs Heat Shield on Private Spacecraft for Journey to Hunt Life on Venus
A company that's slated to launch the world's first-ever private mission to Venus is getting ready for the planet's super-hot temperatures with some help from NASA. The space agency boasted in a press release that it's working with Rocket Lab, a California-based aerospace manufacturer, to apply a heat shield onto the small space capsule that's scheduled to launch next summer. Along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rocket Lab has since 2021 been planning its Venus Life Finder mission that will, as the name suggests, check for signs of life amid the cloudtops of the second planet from the Sun. To prepare the 50-pound probe — which will also track weather patterns on the uber-acidic world — for the intense heat of our Solar System's hottest planet, NASA is applying a brown woven material that can protect crafts from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Known as the Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology, or "HEEET" for short, the rugged spacecraft outerwear that looks like something out of "Star Wars" was invented at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. To test it out, researchers subjected the woven material to extremely high temperatures at the Ames' Arc Jet Complex, which NASA bills as the highest-powered "arc-heated hyper-thermal test facility" in the US. While NASA clearly has the infrastructure to support and test out these sorts of materials, the woman running the Venus Life Finder mission has suggested that private companies like Rocket Labs will be able to launch these sorts of projects for far less money than the agency could. "We hope this is the start of a new paradigm where you go cheaply, more often, and in a more focused way," explained Sara Seager, the project's principal investigator, in an MIT news release back when the mission was first announced in 2021. "This is a newer, nimbler, faster way to do space science." Indeed, as the Planetary Society notes, the Venus Life Finder mission was estimated by the MIT Tech Review to cost less than $10 million — a minuscule amount compared to the $500 million per project price tag on NASA's DAVINCI the Jet Propulsion Lab's VERITAS, which both are slated to go to Venus soon. As fascinating as the mission will be once it launches, the probe isn't going to spend very much time sailing through the Venusian clouds. As MIT Tech notes, the 50-pound capsule will likely only have about five minutes to transmit its findings back to Earth as it falls further and further down to the planet's surface, where it will end its days. To make sure the capsule survives long enough to radio its discoveries back to Earth during that short window of time, some majorly high-tech gear will be necessary to protect it — and luckily, NASA's got just the thing. More on planetary visits: NASA Spacecraft Whipping Around Mars to Slingshot Itself Toward Jupiter's Mysterious Moon
