Related papers: Mariner 2 and its Legacy: 50 Years on

More than 30 years have passed since the Voyager 2 fly-bys of Uranus and Neptune. I discuss a range of lessons learned from Voyager, broadly grouped into process, planning, and people. In terms of process, we must be open to new concepts:…

In this chapter we examine how our knowledge of present day Venus can inform terrestrial exoplanetary science and how exoplanetary science can inform our study of Venus. In a superficial way the contrasts in knowledge appear stark. We have…

For over a decade, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have been recording measurements from the Martian surface as a part of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. One quantity of interest has been the opacity of Mars's…

The Voyager probes are the furthest, still active, spacecraft ever launched from Earth. During their 38-year trip, they have collected data regarding solar wind properties (such as the plasma velocity and magnetic field intensity).…

Since the beginning of robotic interplanetary exploration nearly six decades ago, successful atmospheric entry has been accomplished at Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Titan. More entry probe missions are planned to Venus, Titan, and…

Why are the terrestrial planets so different? Venus should be the most Earth-like of all our planetary neighbours. Its size, bulk composition and distance from the Sun are very similar to those of the Earth. Its original atmosphere was…

As we become aware of Earth's changing climate, and as we discover terrestrial planets in other solar systems, we gain ever more reasons to study the Earth's nearest neighbour and closest sibling, the only Earth-sized planet besides our own…

This paper details a significant milestone towards maturing a buoyant aerial robotic platform, or aerobot, for flight in the Venus clouds. We describe two flights of our subscale altitude-controlled aerobot, fabricated from the materials…

Lightning in planetary atmospheres is now a well-established concept. Here we discuss the available detection techniques for, and observations of, planetary lightning by spacecraft, planetary landers and, increasingly, sophisticated…

An effective method for detailed observation of the Solar System planets is the use of vehicles that can perform flight in their atmospheres, with the most promising of them being Flyers (aircraft for other planets atmospheres). Besides the…

The Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission described herein has been selected for flight to Venus as part of the NASA Discovery Program. DAVINCI will be the first mission to Venus to…

A defining characteristic of the planet Venus is its thick, CO2-dominated atmosphere. Despite over fifty years of robotic exploration, including thirteen successful atmosphere probes and landers, our knowledge of N2, the…

Although fifty years have passed since the discovery of radio pulsars, there is still no satisfactory understanding of how these amazing objects operate. While there has been significant progress in understanding the basic properties of…

In this paper we test the hypothesis that the Pioneer anomaly can be of gravitational origin by comparing the predicted model-independent shifts Delta a/a for the semimajor axis of Uranus and Neptune with the Voyager 2 radio-technical…

Spectroscopic transiting observations of the atmospheres of hot Jupiters around other stars, first with Hubble Space Telescope and then Spitzer, opened the door to compositional studies of exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope will…

The composition of an atmosphere has integrated the geological history of the entire planetary body. However, the long-term evolutions of the atmospheres of the terrestrial planets are not well documented. For Earth, there were until…

The similarity of Venus and Earth in bulk properties make Venus an appealing target for future colonization. Several proposals have been put forward for colonizing and even terraforming Venus despite the extreme conditions on the planet's…

The Ingenuity helicopter test flights on Mars in April 2021 marked the first time a powered aircraft has flown on another world. Students who have access to model helicopters and drones may wonder, how well could those hover on the Red…

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission will provide simultaneous measurements from two spacecraft, offering an unprecedented opportunity to investigate magnetospheric and exospheric dynamics at Mercury as well as their interactions with the solar…

Electrostatic analyzers of different designs have been used since the earliest days of the space age, beginning with the very earliest solar wind measurements made by Mariner 2 en route to Venus in 1962. The Parker Solar Probe (PSP)…