Tau.Neutrino said:
ESA names space mission concepts in running for Cosmic Vision mission slot
The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced three major space mission concepts it is now examining to fill the fifth medium class mission slot in its Cosmic Vision science program. The new missions under consideration include a next-generation infrared space telescope, a surveyor craft that seeks out transient high-energy events, and a new Venus orbiter.
more…
Initial ESA press release
The three candidates, the Transient High Energy Sky and Early Universe Surveyor (Theseus), the SPace Infrared telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (Spica), and the EnVision mission to Venus were selected from 25 proposals put forward by the scientific community, with proposed launch date 2032.
Thesus promises to make a complete census of gamma-ray bursts from the Universe’s first billion years. It would provide real-time triggers and accurate locations of such high-energy events.
Which reminds me of the SWIFT telescope. How’s that doing? Apparently very well. Mission duration Planned: 2 years, Elapsed: 13 years, 5 months, 23 days.
Spica would be a joint European-Japanese project that offers significant improvement in far-infrared spectroscopic and survey capabilities over NASA’s Spitzer and ESA’s Herschel space observatories.
Venus is often considered as Earth’s evil twin. Despite being roughly the same size and neighbours in the inner Solar System, the two planets have evolved very differently: Venus has experienced a catastrophic runaway greenhouse effect and today is enshrouded with a thick toxic atmosphere. EnVision follows on from ESA’s highly successful Venus Express that focused primarily on atmospheric research. Planned to be implemented with NASA participation, next-generation EnVision would determine the nature and current state of geological activity on Venus and its relationship with the atmosphere, to better understand the different evolutionary pathways of the two planets. It would map the surface and obtain detailed radar images, improving on those obtained by NASA’s Magellan in the 1990s to provide greater insight into the geological evolution of the surface.
I vote for EnVision. We need a better radar mapping of Venus surface and geological activity. To put it succinctly, we still know SFA about the surface of Venus.