The mission is supposed to be part of the “Decade of Venus,” teaming with two other probes due to launch around 2030: DaVinci, which remains funded and on track, is an atmospheric probe being led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center EnVision is an orbiter being built by the European Space Agency. Veritas - which stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy - was selected by NASA just two years ago, to the elation of scientists who think the planet is loaded with scientific treasures. “It is the best shot we have of answering the question of whether there was life on Mars.” - Laurie Leshin They think Mars always get the spa treatment while Earth’s twin gets a cold cup of gruel. The agency’s attempt to lighten JPL’s workload by shelving Veritas has exacerbated a long-simmering feud among planetary scientists: Venus experts feel ignored. “It is the best shot we have of answering the question of whether there was life on Mars.” “This is a mission I’ve been trying to get flown for 25 years,” said Leshin, a geochemist and space scientist who is on the team studying Mars via the Curiosity rover. It’s a multibillion-dollar collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency that aspires to haul Martian soil back to Earth sometime in the next decade for laboratory scrutiny. One of the most ambitious and diabolically difficult missions is yet to come: Mars Sample Return. probe to orbit Venus in more than three decades. Psyche is now on track to launch this October, but the delay and associated budget overruns had a secondary effect: After reviewing the situation, NASA decided to postpone by at least three years a major JPL mission called Veritas that would have sent the first U.S.
#The fireside software
But Psyche missed its September 2022 launch date because of a failure to test software in a timely manner. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech, had planned to launch a probe called Psyche on a voyage to a 140-mile-wide metallic asteroid by the same name. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus sprawls across the verdant hills rising above Pasadena, about 10 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. “I would call it a challenging phase,” Lee said.
The United States needs to bring in more tech talent from abroad if it wants to maintain its technological exceptionalism, he added. Gentry Lee, a JPL veteran and member of the review board, said lab employees have seen pay bumps of 60 percent or more when lured away by the private sector. But the delays are a stark reminder that JPL needs to be firing on all cylinders at a time when missions are more complex, and the traditional aerospace sector is struggling to hire and retain talented engineers. NASA officials acknowledge the recent problems and say they’ve made progress in resolving the workforce issues by luring back dozens of departed staffers. “They just don’t have the manpower they need to do the missions.” “The things they do require incredible people to do it,” Thomas Young, former director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and chair of the internal review board, said earlier this year. A sobering report issued by an independent review board in the fall concluded that the lab simply has too many missions and not enough experienced engineers to pull them off. That’s why the aerospace world was surprised last year by the lab’s failure to deliver an asteroid probe on time, a stumble that NASA responded to by postponing a JPL-led Venus mission. JPL can be credited with many of the agency’s most flamboyant successes in planetary science.
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