Human Assisted Science at Venus: Venus Exploration in the New Human Spaceflight Age

Noam Izenberg,Ralph L Mcnutt, Jr,Paul K Byrne,Alexander Macdonald,Kirby D Runyon

doi:10.3847/25c2cfeb.c853ead4

Abstract

Some human mission trajectories to Mars include flybys of Venus. These flybys provide opportunities to practice deep space human operations, and offer numerous safe-return-to-Earth options, before committing to longer and lower-cadence Mars-only flights. Venus flybys, as part of dedicated missions to Mars, also enable human-in-the-loop scientific study of the second planet. The time to begin coordinating such Earth-to-Mars-via-Venus missions is now

Highlights

The NASA Administrator’s IAC speech in 2019 indicated NASA is considering oppositionclass human missions to Mars—where Mars and Earth are close to each other in their orbits at launch —that would include a Venus fly by as part of an overall two-year mission [1]
NASA’s recently released “Sustained Lunar Exploration and Development” report [2] confirms that a twoyear round-trip mission to Mars, with a short stay on the Martian surface, is the current plan for the first human mission to Mars, implying an opposition-class mission which a Venus flyby can help enable (Figure 2)
Ever since NASA’s EMPIRE (“Early Manned Planetary–Interplanetary Roundtrip Expeditions”) and UMPIRE (“Unfavorable Manned Planetary–Interplanetary Roundtrip Expeditions”) studies in the 1960s and early 1970s, it has been clear that Venus flybys can reduce the overall energy requirements for opposition-class missions to Mars (Figure 2) [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

Summary

Introduction

The NASA Administrator’s IAC speech in 2019 indicated NASA is considering oppositionclass human missions to Mars—where Mars and Earth are close to each other in their orbits at launch —that would include a Venus fly by as part of an overall two-year mission [1]. Some human mission trajectories to Mars include flybys of Venus These flybys provide opportunities to practice deep space human operations, and offer numerous safe-return-to-Earth options, before committing to longer and lowercadence Mars-only flights

Results

Conclusion