Indian ISRO Venus Orbiter Mission Shukrayaan will Conduct Detailed Venus Analysis

ISRO as India’s National Space Agency, which has been one of the most active space agencies in the world with Mars and Lunar Missions, is now planning its Venus Orbiter Mission Shukrayaan.On September 18, the Indian Government Union Cabinet approved ISRO’s proposed Venus Orbiter Mission (VOM) with a budget of about $150 million.

Formerly called Shukrayaan, VOM will launch on the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3)—India’s most powerful rocket—during the Venus launch window of March 2028. After reaching Venus in four months, VOM will fire its engines to reduce its velocity and enter a highly elliptical polar orbit of 500 by 60,000 kilometers. It will then use Venus’ atmosphere to gradually aerobrake over months and lower its orbit to 200 by 600 kilometers. From there, VOM will employ its dozen-plus instruments for over five years to study Venus’ surface, subsurface, atmosphere, and how the latter’s activities are shaped by the Sun’s wind. Three of the instruments have foreign contributions: from Russia, Sweden, and Germany.

VOM be India’s first mission to the planet but it will arrive there a little before NASA’s VERITAS and ESA’s EnVision orbiters do, and that it will sport instruments akin to both. The three missions converge on a single goal: understanding Venus’ past and therefore how and why it diverged from being Earth-like to a zone of hell. VOM’s inclusion in the global Venus exploration manifest therefore presents three opportunities:

• one for India to conduct uniquely impactful science and advance its wish to become a planetary science powerhouse
• one for scientists globally, who will be able to combine similar as well as complementary datasets from flagship Venus missions of three space agencies
• and the most potent of all: an opportunity for the space agencies sending these craft to coordinate observations to gain more science than the sum of its parts.

VOM will have an S-band Synthetic Aperture Radar to make a global map of Venus at 20–30 meters/pixel, which is more than four times the resolution of the Magellan mapping orbiter NASA launched in 1989.  VOM will also carry a subsurface sounder, making it the first to see parts of Venus’ subsurface. While LVM3 is indeed finally the rocket that will loft India’s Venus orbiter, it cost the agency and the country five years of delay to get here. However, VOM is also a mission that’s better late than early. Unlike India’s first Mars orbiter Mangalyaan, which was squarely a technology demonstrator, VOM is a science mission. It has more massive instruments than Mangalyaan’s payloads which totaled only 15 kilograms. Crucially, VOM will be in a polar orbit close to Venus to gather substantial scientific data—200 by 600 kilometers versus Mangalyaan’s 420 by 80,000 kilometers for Mars. Even if half of VOM’s objectives are achieved, its outcome would be gladly different.

As Aerospace Lectures website we support India’s Mission to Venus with its Venus Orbiter Mission Shukrayaan.