Human Assisted Science at Venus: Venus Exploration in the New Human Spaceflight Age

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential for human-assisted Venus flybys as part of Mars missions, highlighting their benefits for operational practice, scientific study, and mission safety in the new era of human spaceflight.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of integrating Venus flybys into Mars missions to enhance scientific research and operational readiness in human space exploration.

Findings

Venus flybys offer valuable practice for deep space human operations.

They provide safe-return options before Mars-only missions.

Venus flybys enable scientific study of Venus with human involvement.

Abstract

Some human mission trajectories to Mars include flybys of Venus. These flybys provide opportunities to practice deep space human operations, and offer numerous safe-return-to-Earth options, before committing to longer and lower-cadence Mars-only flights. Venus flybys, as part of dedicated missions to Mars, also enable human-in-the-loop scientific study of the second planet. The time to begin coordinating such Earth-to-Mars-via-Venus missions is now