In a list of a few interesting reports - one of an ESA Venus entry probe including a balloon that drops many micro-probes.

Doug

What sort of list? Is this being seriously considered?

Ahh yes - a URL might help

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=37020

Doug

Some quick screengrabs from the .PDF of the ESA speculative missions:

This certainly looks like a superset of possible ESA missions -- they couldn't fly all of them within a reasonable budget unless it was over a span of decades.

In fact, even Mercury sample return or that Venus multi-craft mission alone look like bank-busters.

I think the first Mercury sample return ought to be a smash-and-grab that consists of a return craft which is in solar orbit and an impactor that strikes the surface and blasts some tiny fragments up for a collector on the return craft to grab and bring back to Earth. A solar orbit which intersects Mercury's and the Earth's would require vastly less delta-v than anything with a Mercury lander (or even an orbiter), and a lot of the point of a sample return mission could be fulfilled with this much cheaper alternative. While careful surface geology would be missing from this mission, and even the structure of the return would be compromised by the violent nature of the return, isotopic signatures would be unaffected, and probably some interesting characteristics due to the intense solar wind could be detected. Finally, having isotopic information re: Mercury's crust would permit the identification of mercurian meteorites that may already be sitting in terrestrial collections.

This mission architecture is possible for any airless world, and probably ought to be exploited in every possible instance, from Mercury to the martian moons, asteroids, and even the Galileans.

The Venus stack described here would be a wonderful mission -- if it could be budgeted.

VENUS ENTRY PROBE WORKSHOP
19-20 JANUARY 2006
ESTEC (THE NETHERLANDS)

SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT

Dear colleagues,

The goal of the Venus Entry Probe Workshop (VEPWS) is to discuss both scientific objectives and technical constraints for a future in-situ exploration mission to Venus, consisting of a combination of orbiter(s), descent probes and/or balloons. Scientists and engineers are invited to participate, so that the results of the technical studies performed by different space agencies in this field can be presented to the wide scientific community, and scientific objectives and questions, including possible instrumentation and required mission scenarios, can become known to the engineers.

Information relative to the workshop can be found at the following address: http://www.oal.ul.pt/~magic/VEP06/index.html

Please, register and propose material - abstracts, scientific ideas to prepare discussion - (registration and abstract forms are available on the website), before January 13, 2006. For those of you who positively answered to the first announcement, but were not sure to attend, please confirm your participation to the meeting as soon as possible. Don't forget to reserve a room (a list of hotel may be found on the website)

Best regards.

Eric Chassefière, Maarten Roos-Serote and Olivier Witasse