The French Space Agency CNES announced on September 30, 2020 that it going to participate in ISRO’s Venus Mission which has been named SHUKRAYAAN. The mission is going to be launched in 2025.
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Key Facts
- ISRO intends to send an orbiter mission to Venus in order to study the atmosphere of Venus.
- The atmosphere is primarily made up to of carbon dioxide.
- The Shukrayaan mission will study the dense and hot atmosphere of Venus.
- It will also study the planet’s surface using a probe.
- French payload will be flown on an Indian exploration mission for the first time.
- ISRO have also selected The VIRAL (Venus Infrared Atmospheric Gases Linker) instrument that has been co-developed with the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos and the LATMOS atmospheres, environments and space observations laboratory attached to the French national scientific research centre CNRS.
Shukrayaan-1
- The satellite configuration and payloads on Shukrayaan-1 have not been finalised yet.
- But the science objectives feeding to the design of the spacecraft are
- the “super-rotation” of the atmosphere of Venus.
- how it interacts with solar radiation and solar winds.
- The mission will study the atmospheric chemistry, compositional variations and dynamics of Planet Venus.
- Earlier, the mission was scheduled to be launched in 2023.
Ongoing Venus Mission
42 Venus missions have been sent to Venus from planet Earth as of now. Japan’s Akatsuki which is also known as the Venus Climate Orbiter and Planet-C, is currently moving around Venus. It has been tasked to study the atmosphere of Venus.