14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with the American space agency say that a new sounding rocket was successfully launched for Venus yesterday, November 25, from the NASA White Sands Test Facility, in New Mexico. The launch comes just a week after the agency's new orbiter took off on a 10-month trek to the Red Planet.
The mission that launched yesterday is not as complex as MAVEN. It comprises of a rocket laden with scientific instruments, which will collect data on Venus and its atmosphere after it exits our own planet's atmosphere. The latter can significantly hamper astronomical observations of nearby objects.
NASA experts say that the mission is called the Venus Spectral Rocket (VeSpR), and that it consists of two rocket stages. The first comes from a Terrier surface-to-air missile, while the second was taken from a Black Brant model Mk1 sounding rocket.
Both components were integrated and tested at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, in Virginia, where an ultraviolet telescope was also included in the Black Brant stage. This observatory will assess how UV light is reflected through the Venusian atmosphere, providing insight into the world's water history.
“It is appropriate that these launch dates are close together, because both missions will study atmospheric loss. VeSpR will peek at Venus from above Earth's absorbing atmosphere, and MAVEN will journey to Mars to do a long-term study,” explains scientist Kelly Fast.
She holds an appointment as a program officer for Planetary Astronomy at NASA Headquarters, in Washington, DC, and is also a program scientist for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft.
VeSpR will be able to boost its ultraviolet telescope to an altitude of 110 kilometers (65 miles), taking it well beyond the distorting influence of Earth's atmosphere. From this vantage point, the instrument will be able to collect important readings of the Venusian atmosphere.
“Venus today has a thick atmosphere that contains very little water, but we think the planet started out with an ocean's worth of water,” explains the principal investigator of the VeSpR missin, Boston University researcher John T. Clarke.
NASA experts estimate that the VeSpR telescopes captured 8 minutes of data, before being parachuted back to Earth, and retrieved for future studies.