White Paper: The Thalassa Mission Concept to Venus
Last year, NASA put out the Planetary Mission Concept Study call to solicit ideas for missions that can inform the next NASA Planetary Science decadal survey. I teamed up with a group of planetary scientists to develop the science case for a sorely needed mission to Venus. Check out the introduction, and click on the link below to download a PDF of the paper!
The Thalassa mission concept was developed for a proposal submitted to the NASA Planetary Mission Concept Studies call in May 2019. In this White Paper, we describe the mission concept, its overarching scientific focus and objectives, and our notional implementation for tackling those objectives. By combining a comprehensive instrument suite with multiplatform architecture—an orbiter, an aerial platform, and dropsondes—the Thalassa mission concept has been designed to explore the upper and middle atmosphere and the surface of Venus, motivated by a single scientific focus: Determine the extent to which water has played a role in the geological evolution of Venus.