Rocket Lab, leveraging its expertise from lunar missions, anticipates launching a highly awaited privately funded venture to Venus by the end of 2024.
Rocket Lab, leveraging its expertise from lunar missions, anticipates launching a highly awaited privately funded venture to Venus by the end of 2024.
Christopher Mandy, lead system engineer for Rocket Lab’s interplanetary endeavors, disclosed the target launch date of December 30, 2024, for the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus at a recent meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG).
This mission, also known as the Venus Life Finder, involves dispatching a compact spacecraft to Venus. A probe will autonomously navigate and enter the planet’s atmosphere, equipped with a specialized instrument—an autofluorescence nephelometer—to identify organic compounds in cloud droplets. Proposed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this initiative aims to seek potential signs of life in Venus’s atmosphere.
Collaborating with MIT and other partners, Rocket Lab relies on private funding for this mission. While initially slated for a May 2023 launch, the project was deferred due to other priorities. Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, clarified in an April interview that the Venus mission is a “nights-and-weekends project,” but reiterated their commitment to its progress.
Mandy confirmed steady advancements in the mission’s development, highlighting the involvement of external vendors in providing critical components. These include a thermal protection system from NASA’s Ames Research Center and the primary instrument from Droplet Measurement Technologies. Both deliveries are expected by year-end, enabling spacecraft assembly, integration, and testing in the ensuing year.
The present timeline targets a launch on December 30, with specifics on the mission’s duration yet to be disclosed. An Electron rocket will deploy the 315-kilogram spacecraft into low Earth orbit, where it will undergo a series of maneuvers, culminating in a lunar flyby to propel it towards Venus. This trajectory is set to bring the spacecraft to Venus by May 13, 2025.
Upon separation, the probe will collect crucial data during a five-minute descent through Venus’s upper atmosphere. Subsequently, it will transmit the acquired data for 20 minutes before reaching an altitude of approximately 22 kilometers. At this point, the probe will encounter extreme atmospheric pressure and temperature, marking the operational limits of the mission’s hardware.
The mission strategically capitalizes on the technology and mission framework used for CAPSTONE, a NASA-backed lunar mission that launched on an Electron rocket in June 2022. This reuse of existing designs aligns with Rocket Lab’s cost-effective approach for privately funded initiatives.
While MIT envisions more ambitious missions in the future, this Venus probe primarily serves as a demonstration for Rocket Lab. Mandy emphasized that Rocket Lab is not currently planning to fund additional missions but aims to inspire broader interest in similar endeavors by showcasing the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of this mission.
The project’s cost is expected to align with NASA’s smallest class of planetary science missions, known as SIMPLEx, which has a cost cap of $55 million. However, constrained budgets have led NASA to defer decisions on future SIMPLEx missions.