The comeback of VERITAS is even more striking.<\/p>\n
\u201cVERITAS is now funded with a launch date of November 2032, so this is great news for us,\u201d said Dan Nunes, the mission\u2019s deputy project scientist at JPL. \u201cWe\u2019re staffing up. We\u2019re accelerating, not to the point of Jim\u2019s acceleration [on DAVINCI], but we\u2019re moving.\u201d<\/p>\n
VERITAS is targeted to launch the month after DAVINCI arrives at Venus. \u201cIt keeps building on momentum for Venus science, which is great,\u201d Nunes said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to arrive at Venus close to the middle of 2033, and we\u2019re going to have a phase of aerobraking\u201d before beginning routine science observations.<\/p>\n
In recent months, engineers working on the DAVINCI mission completed experiments showing how the Venus probe\u2019s cameras and instruments will capture data during its one-shot descent through the atmosphere. It will take about an hour for DAVINCI\u2019s battery-powered titanium descent craft to travel from space to the surface of Venus, and all of its imagery and data must be relayed to Earth through a radio link with DAVINCI\u2019s carrier spacecraft before it goes over the horizon.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to optimize everything in the final eight to 10 minutes of descent as we come into the supercritical atmosphere to get this data back for all of us to work with,\u201d Garvin said.<\/p>\n