Martha Gilmore is currently working on two projects with NASA.
As NASA contemplates more voyages exploring our inner solar system, it’s tapping the talents of some scientists here in Connecticut. One scientist hopes to send a probe to Venus.
Venus was last visited by the U.S. in 1990 when the Magellan spacecraft arrived.
“Magellan looked with radar and it uncovered this Earth-sized world that is covered with volcanoes and lava flows, but yet has a very different geologic history and a very different atmosphere than our earth,” said Martha Gilmore, a professor at Wesleyan University.
Gilmore is a geologist who uses rockets to do a lot of her research in space. She’s currently working on two projects with NASA. If approved within the next year, one or both could send a probe to Venus as soon as 2020.
One of the missions would study Venus’ atmosphere. The other would produce higher-resolution images of the planet’s surface.
“We’re very interested in how climate works on the earth and this gives us another laboratory to understand the process of having a lot of Greenhouse Gas and understand how that effects temperature and evolves over time,” Gilmore said.
Both proposals are part of NASA’s Discovery program, a relatively low-cost program that sent trailblazing programs like Pathfinder to Mars in the late 1990s.
Also this week, the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Groton announced it will study volunteers kept inside a capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The lab usually studies underwater explorers, but the idea here analyze how teams cope with stress during month-long simulations of space flight.
Important info as NASA considers possible future manned missions to Mars.
