ISRO's Mission Venus invites experiments from space enthusiasts everywhere

In what could be the first Indian mission to orbit Venus, ISRO has new and improved plans for a ‘Mission Venus’ in mid-2023, a report in the Hindu claims. The mission would be ISRO’s first to Venus, modified and upgraded from early sketches made after the agency’s success with the Mangalyaan Mars mission that was launched in November 2013. The orbiter will study the planet between 500 kilometres to 60,000 kilometres from the surface in an elliptical orbit around the planet — similar to the Mangalyaan mission. While the Venus orbiter mission is similar to Mangalyaan in many ways, it will carry a different set of science experiments. Roughly a dozen of these experiments will be sourced from Indian scientists. A few of the experiments will also be chosen among ideas generated by space enthusiasts around the world. [caption id=“attachment_5534651” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] ISRO’s Mission to Venus will be its third interplanetary voyage.[/caption] ISRO has opened up ideas for the mission’s experiments to other space agencies, universities and researchers from around the world. The mission will carry the shortlisted experiments to Venus’s orbit in mid-2023. The project is currently still a long way from approval — awaiting scrutiny of the Space Science Advisory Committee and the Space Commission before the government’s nod. The plans, still in early stages, would get refined and clearer once the experiments onboard are confirmed, an ISRO official told the Hindu. The Venus voyager, if approved, would become India’s third ever interplanetary probe, following the Chandrayaan moon mission in 2008 and the Mangalyaan Mars mission in 2013. Chandrayaan-2 , ISRO’s lander and rover mission to the moon, is scheduled to liftoff in January or February 2019.