ISRO gears up for another mission to Venus

Chennai : After almost three years India’s Mars orbiter successfully reached the red planet in its very first attempt. After this success, Indian Space Research Organization is again planning a mission similar to this one to planet Venus.

ISRO made a formal announcement of its intention and even invited proposals from scientist for space based experiment which is to be carried in the Venus mission to study the earth’s twin sister.

Venus is often called as twin sister of Earth because of the similarities between them in size, mass, density, bulk, gravity and composition. Also Venus is closer to sun as compared to Earth, which gets it higher solar flux. The exploration of Venus began way back in 1960 with Soviet Union’s Venera mission. From then till now Venus has been explored by flyby, orbiter and few Lander missions and atmospheric probes by various countries.

The mission will carry scientific instruments weighing around 175kg which is actually 10 times more than the scientific payload carried by the MOM. “This is still a preliminary step. We are looking at the kind of payloads for the Venus mission,” said Isro chairman A.S.Kiran Kumar.

The orbit which is proposed is expected to be around 500 x 60,000 km around Venus but will get reduced in several months to orbit closer to the planet.

ISRO is much likely to take the Venus Mission in 2021 or 2022. When enquired about whether ISRO has finalized the next interplanetary mission to Venus, ISRO Chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar said, “We are working on the possibilities of many missions and Venus is also one of them. It takes many years to complete the payloads and finalize the mission.  We will do a Venus mission for sure. But we are yet to decide other details like when the mission will be sent and the payloads. At present, we want to know about areas that our scientific community is interested in studying on Venus,”

ISRO has fixed the last date to receive proposals to be May 19.