Northrop Grumman wants to send a plane to Venus. But it has to give the Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform some wings on Earth first: Northrop is hoping to win the New Frontiers competition next year and land $1 billion of that sweet, sweet NASA money.

New Frontiers is a program designed to sponsor medium-sized space missions. That is probes that are bigger than Discovery missions like the Dawn spacecraft currently visiting the dwarf planet Ceres, but smaller than flagship missions like Cassini, the spacecraft that beams back all those beautiful pictures of Saturn and its moons. The New Horizons spacecraft that's closing in on an encounter with Pluto came out of the New Frontiers program.

The Grumman plane would be an inflatable propellor plane that looks like it came right out of 1940s sci-fi pulp. From an altitude of 31 miles above the surface of Venus, it would study the atmosphere and observe the hellish surface.

The technology is largely derived from Rapid Eye, a DARPA-funded plane that was cancelled in 2010. But the plane must be retrofitted to Venus' hot, sulphuric atmosphere – a tall order considering that, to work, it also has to be built of lightweight composites and be ready to launch by 2021.

NASA will decide on the next New Frontiers mission next year. Northrop's Venus plane will run up against stiff competition including probes to Saturn, Jupiter's moon Io, and other Venus missions, including a lander.

Northrop Grumman

Source: SpaceNews

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