2.03.2025
NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete
Engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Bohdan Wesely, right, and Eli Hiss, left, complete a fit check of the two halves of a space capsule that will study the clouds of Venus for signs of life.
Led by Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California, and their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Rocket Lab’s Venus mission will be the first private mission to the planet.
NASA’s role is to help the commercial space endeavor succeed by providing expertise in thermal protection of small spacecraft. Invented at Ames, NASA’s Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) – the brown, textured material covering the bottom of the capsule in this photo – is a woven heat shield designed to protect spacecraft from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The probe will deploy from Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft bus, taking measurements as it descends through the planet’s atmosphere.
Teams at Ames work with private companies, like Rocket Lab, to turn NASA materials into solutions such as the heat shield tailor-made for this spacecraft destined for Venus, supporting growth of the new space economy. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, part of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, supported development of the heat shield for Rocket Lab’s Venus mission.
Quelle: NASA
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Update: 18.03.2025
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The 1st private mission to Venus comes together ahead of possible 2026 launch
The first private spacecraft mission to Venus will combat the planet's hellish conditions with the aid of a novel woven heat shield called "HEEET."
Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley report progress in installing a heat shield on the first private spacecraft targeted for Venus.
Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California, is leading the effort, along with their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
NASA's Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) was invented at the NASA Ames center.
Woven heat shield
HEET is a textured material covering the bottom of the capsule, a woven heat shield designed to protect spacecraft from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2482 degrees Celsius).
The private Venus probe would be deployed from Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft bus.
This probe will take measurements as it descends through the clouds of Venus.
"We missed our January 2025 launch window and now wait until the next one summer 2026," said MIT's Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and leader of the Morningstar Missions to Venus team – a series of planned missions designed to investigate the possibility of life in Venus' clouds.
The science phase of the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus targets the Venus cloud layer between 72 and 97 mile altitude, enabling around 330 seconds of science observations. (Image credit: NASA/Ames Research Center)
The first mission, a collaboration with Rocket Lab, is the small, low-cost probe designed to measure autofluorescence and backscattered polarized radiation to detect the presence of organic molecules in the clouds.
That spacecraft is now going on Rocket Lab's yet-to-fly Neutron booster, instead of an Electron launcher, so the private Venus mission is tied to the Neutron coming online, Seager told Inside Outer Space.
"On my side, we completed the instrument build and had our first integration tests with the probe, the part that will be dropped off into the Venus atmosphere. All is progressing," said Seager.
Quelle: SC