Venus surface and atmospheric sample return mission: preliminary design

Venus surface and atmospheric sample return mission Among the main goals of the space exploration, understanding how Earth did evolved, how it is evolving and how it will is surely one of the most critical ones. Despite this, it still remains foundamental investigate if, in what forms and for how long, other planets might have hosted some kind of intelligent life. For many years the international scientific community, has put into placea a huge and common effort aimed to clarify those issues in the best way possible. Two main rocky planets next door to the Earth, might actually be deeply studied. They are crucial in such effort and they Venus and Earth. Venus il the closest planet to Earth and it is the most similar one in terms of mass and dimensions. The major discrepancies lie in the fact that Venus’ surface temperature is about 480 °C, the pressure at sea level is almost 92 atmosphere and that the chemical enviroment is mostly (> 96%) made up of carbon dioxide. From 70 up to 100 km altitude, a phenomena called super-rotation takes place. It consists in winds blowing at more than 100 m/s. Venus does not have its own magnetic field and its inner part in almost totally unknown. On the other hand, it have an incredible intense electric field expecially at high altitude. Also, at the ground, recent morphologic reformation phenomena took place. Still, older unknown region, called Tesserae, are present. Along with the previous one, many more findings aquired through direct and indirect measurements, are not grasped yet. It is true, in fact, that to design such a mission is rather complex. The harsh enviroment makes developing a lander able to land, work (acquiring, analazing, exchanging pieces of information) unbelievably challenging. NASA did classified future missions towards Venus as “Flagship Missions”, namely extremely costly and technologically complicated ones. VISAGE "Venus In Situ Atmospheric and Geochemical Explorer", must be able to look into the surface, subsurface and the venusian atmosphere, in order to find meaningful responses about those questions. Among the different “Flagship” missions, Sample Return (SR) missions, are the most challenging. Particularly, the preliminary analysis and design phase of a Lander able to perform a SASR mission, of its subsystems and its science payload is the final goal of this master’s thesis.