My group and I chose to do the planet Venus and the missions that were done to get information about the planet. The mission that I chose to do was Pioneer Venus. It was part of the Pioneer program, which consisted of two spacecraft’s, the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the Pioneer Venus Multi-probe. The program was managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center. Before explaining the mission and what I learned about it, lets focus on Venus for a bit and learn about the background of the planet. Next to the sun and moon Venus is the third brightest in the sky. By the size and mass it can be said to be the sister planet to Earth because they are so similar to each other. Also it is the closest planet to Earth. Clouds formed from sulfuric acid …show more content…
For example the main objective for this project was to investigate the solar wind in the planets environment, by using the radar imaging system to map the surface of Venus and study the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. It was designed to be a multi-probe spacecraft to send four other probes from a courier called the bus and enter the atmosphere. To collect samples and readings about the atmosphere it contained seventeen experiments. Some of the experiments were a cloud photo-Polari meter to measure the vertical distribution of the clouds, an electric field detector to study the solar wind, its interactions, and a surface radar mapper to determine topography and surface characteristics, a magnetometer to characterize the magnetic field, a radio occultation experiment to characterize the atmosphere, a gamma ray burst detector which recorded gamma ray bursts events, and one last one an airglow ultraviolet spectrometer which was used to measure properties of the solar wind (Observations and Explorations of Venus). It also consisted of two spacecraft’s called the Orbiter and the …show more content…
It was about 1.5 m in diameter and was equipped with seven experiments. This was mounted on the Multi-probe Bus and was launched on August 16th 1978. The experiments were a neutral mass spectrometer to measure the atmospheric composition, a gas chromatograph to measure the atmospheric composition, the solar flux radiometer for measurement for solar flux penetration in the atmosphere, infrared radiometer to measure distribution of infrared radiation, cloud particle spectrometer for measurement of particle size and shape, a nephelometer to search for cloud particles, and temperature, pressure, and acceleration sensors (California Science