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Radars are the way to see the surface of Venus at high resolution

The Venus Emissivity Mapper is the way to get compositional information

About the Venus Emissivity Mapper (VEM)

The Mission, the first program in KQED's series Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco, premiered in December, 1994. The one-hour documentary, which traces the rich history of San Francisco's Mission District, has received three local Emmy nominations and a Bronze Apple from the National Educational Film and Video Festival.

There are no VHS tapes or DVDs available for The Mission from KQED. You may want to check www.eBay.com or www.amazon.com to see if there are any used VHS tapes.

Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco is an ongoing television series designed to explore the rich history of this unique American city. From the earliest Native American villages of the Mission District to the ethnic enclaves of Chinatown and North Beach, each program will reveal the city as a mosaic of communities with interconnecting pasts. Viewers drawn to the fascinating stories will discover meaningful connections between their daily lives and the deeper histories we share. As we continue to grow in our appreciation of diverse cultures, Neighborhoods will supply viewers a crucial sense of the traditions that link us, not only to the past, but to one another.

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This illustration depicts NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. Set to launch in 2023, the Psyche mission will explore a metal-rich asteroid of the same name that lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The mission is moving forward as previously announced, and NASA will incorporate recommendations from the board to ensure its success.
NASA and the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which leads Psyche, shared a response Friday to the results of an independent review board convened to determine why the mission to study a metal-rich asteroid of the same name missed its planned 2022 launch opportunity.
The mission is moving forward as previously announced, and NASA will incorporate recommendations from the board to ensure its success.
The review board – convened at the request of NASA and JPL – found a significant factor in the delay was an imbalance between the workload and the available workforce at JPL. NASA will work closely with JPL management over the coming months to address the challenges raised in the report. The board will meet again in spring 2023 to assess progress.
For the Psyche mission, the board recommended increasing staffing, establishing open communications and an improved reporting system, as well as strengthening the review system to better highlight what issues might affect mission success.
In response, the Psyche project has added appropriately experienced leaders and project staff throughout the project, including filling the project chief engineer and guidance navigation and control cognizant engineer positions. JPL also formed a team to actively manage the staffing shortage across multiple projects including Psyche.
“We welcome this opportunity to hear the independent review board’s findings and have a chance to address the concerns,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “It’s our job to notice issues early – this report is essentially a canary in the coal mine – and address them. Information like this helps us for more than just Psyche, but also for upcoming key missions such as Europa Clipper and Mars sample Return.”
The independent review board also looked at JPL as a whole. The report made recommendations to address what it called inadequate flight project staffing – in both number of personnel and experience – as well as erosion of line organization technical acumen, and the post-pandemic work environment.
Get the Latest JPL News
In response, changes to JPL’s organizational reporting structure and reviews are in work, which along with other actions, are designed to increase institutional insight and oversight of missions including Psyche. JPL also is instituting new internal staffing approaches and working with industrial partners to support staffing needs and to redouble efforts to strengthen experienced leadership at all levels.
“I appreciate the thoughtful work of the Psyche independent review board,” said Laurie Leshin, JPL director. “The board members worked diligently over the past several months to help JPL uncover and understand issues related to the delay of the Psyche launch. Their insights are helping JPL and NASA take the steps necessary to ensure success on Psyche and future missions.”
To support JPL’s staffing needs, NASA anticipates delaying the launch of the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission for at least three years. This choice would allow experienced staff at JPL to complete development of strategic flagship missions further along in their development. A delay of VERITAS, a mission in early formulation, would also free up additional resources to enable the continuation of Psyche and positively affect other planetary funding needs.
VERITAS is a JPL-led mission designed to search for water and volcanic activity on Venus. It was selected in 2021 as one of two Venus proposals for the agency’s Discovery Program, a line of low-cost, competitive missions led by a single principal investigator. The mission, with planned contributions from the Italian Space Agency, German Aerospace Center, and French Space Agency, was originally expected to launch in December 2027. The mission is now scheduled to launch no earlier than 2031.
For a VERITAS delay, JPL will stand down their management and engineering teams for the mission and release the staff to other projects, while funding will be continued for science team support.
NASA’s response to review board, as well as a copy of the report, are available online:
https://go.nasa.gov/3UtmbOz
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
2022-171
Solar System .
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer Gets Final Payload for Moon Water Hunt
Solar System .
NASA’s Europa Probe Gets a Hotline to Earth
Mars .
Watch NASA Engineers Put a Mars Lander’s Legs to the Test
Mars .
NASA InSight Study Finds Mars Is Spinning Faster
Mars .
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Flies Again After Unscheduled Landing
Asteroids and Comets .
Huge Solar Arrays Permanently Installed on NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft
Mars .
NASA Mars Ascent Vehicle Continues Progress Toward Mars sample Return
Solar System .
NASA Mission Update: Voyager 2 Communications Pause
Solar System .
NASA’s Juno Is Getting Ever Closer to Jupiter’s Moon Io
Mars .
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Sees Mars in a New Light
Image .
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer Gets a Taste of Space
Image .
Europa Clipper Gets Its High-Gain On
Image .
Lunar Trailblazer Spacecraft Nears Completion
Image .
Europa Clipper’s High-Gain Antenna Installed
Image .
Powerful Antenna Installed On Europa Clipper
QUIZZES .
Space Trivia
Image .
VERITAS Science Team Members Begin Iceland Campaign
Event Aug. 24, 2023 .
SunRISE: Studying Space Weather with SmallSats
Image .
NASA’s Psyche: Solar Arrays Stowed for Launch
Image .
Preparing for Psyche’s Array Test Deployment
JPL is a federally funded research and development center managed for NASA by Caltech.

source

James O’Keefe, the founder and until this past February CEO of the right-wing nonprofit Project Veritas, is currently under investigation by the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office.

While the exact nature of the investigation is not yet public, the timing would suggest that it relates to O’Keefe’s alleged financial improprieties during his tenure as the group’s chairman and CEO. Back in February, O’Keefe was accused of spending “an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries” by the conservative nonprofit’s own board of directors, amid their very public feud over the management and future of Veritas. Westchester DA Miriam Rocah’s probe follows a raft of civil lawsuits, criminal investigations, and six-figure court losses that have trailed the group under O’Keefe’s leadership—including a still-active federal investigation into the theft of property belonging to President Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden.

“We don’t talk about how we start our investigations,” the Westchester County DA’s director of public affairs, Jin Whang, said when reached by phone. “But if you want confirmation that we were and are, then yes. We can confirm that.”

Attorneys for Project Veritas also filed a civil complaint against O’Keefe in federal court this past May, accusing the ostensible investigative reporting outfit’s original hidden-camera sting artist of breaching his contract and fiduciary duties to the group, among other counts. Despite that pending litigation, made public alongside a detailed new timeline reiterating the board’s own version of its disputes and grievances with O’Keefe, Veritas says that the organization did not prompt the Westchester DA’s investigation into its former leader via a formal criminal referral.

“Project Veritas did not initiate any potential investigation the Westchester DA’s office may be conducting with respect to James O’Keefe,” Hannah Giles, the newly appointed CEO of Project Veritas, responded via e-mail. “However, PV cooperates with the authorities as required by law.”

Giles’s assumption of leadership at Veritas reflects an attempt at continuity for the group, which was launched over a decade ago following the tactical successes of the infamous hidden camera stings against the liberal community-organizing group ACORN by her and O’Keefe. By April 2010, O’Keefe and Giles’s early one-off collaboration would result in the complete dissolution of ACORN’s network of local advocacy groups, whose “get out the vote” efforts had helped to enfranchise millions of low-income and minority voters in underserved communities.

The undercover videos, in which O’Keefe and Giles claimed to be a pimp and a prostitute seeking illicit financial advice from ACORN, ultimately crumbled under scrutiny from California’s attorney general and led to a six-figure settlement paid out to a former ACORN employee. But the viral heat generated by their stings within conservative media nevertheless skyrocketed both of them to a kind of partisan stardom, creating the conditions that allowed O’Keefe to incorporate Project Veritas as a tax-deductible 501(c)3 charity.

In the years since, O’Keefe has made a name for himself by attempting to unearth further supposed malfeasance by liberal activists, politicians, and institutions—as well as by his perceived foes in the establishment media and Big Tech. Multiple people caught up in O’Keefe’s investigations have lost their livelihoods in the frequently incoherent and often inaccurate publicity maelstroms that have followed the typical Project Veritas exposé: nonprofit workers, Obamacare navigators, NPR executives, public school teachers, and news media employees among them.

In October 2021, a federal judge finally stated the obvious about O’Keefe’s latter day Nixonian dirty tricksters, declaring that it was acceptable for litigants to refer to Project Veritas in open court as a “political spying operation.”

Though O’Keefe himself once betrayed his ambitions to make Veritas “the next great intelligence agency,” Veritas’s supposed charitable mission, as detailed annually in its nonprofit filings to the IRS, has consistently been to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions.” Better late than never: The group has finally uncovered all the above at the top of its own organization.

Following O’Keefe’s attempt to unilaterally fire Veritas Chief Financial Officer Tom O’Hara, in contravention of the 501(c)3’s bylaws, and O’Keefe’s own surprise resignation this past February, the Veritas board published a preliminary tally of its former leader’s financial misdeeds.

Pending a “third party investigative audit,” the board accused O’Keefe of spending “$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor,” blowing over $150,000 on high-end limo services, and taking thousands of dollars more for personal DJ equipment. O’Keefe, they said, also requisitioned $60,000 for “dance events,” including the production of a semi-autobiographical pop music celebration of his life in muckraking: the Project Veritas Experience. Such self-indulgent expenditures would be what’s known within the Internal Revenue Code for tax-exempt 501(c)3s as “inurement.”

It’s worth noting that, by the end of the Trump years, Veritas’s cash flow offered ample opportunity for this kind of personal dipping: The group brought in over $22 million in 2020, an exponential swelling in revenue compared to the $396,450 in donations reported in its first year as a nonprofit. And O’Keefe was very much along for the ride, with his reported salary, $56,000 in 2012, growing ultimately to $430,920 by the time of his September 2022 at-will employment agreement.

In private, however, past and present Veritas executives have groused to us for much longer about O’Keefe’s dubiously charitable expenditures outside that reported compensation, including the construction of a recording studio for his high school music buddy Anthony Dini and tens of thousands of dollars in “investigating reporting” and “consulting” fees paid to O’Keefe’s pass-thru NJ S-corp, Veritas Inc.

This March, the board outsourced the remainder of its internal audit to Dorsey & Whitney LLP, the law firm that investigated ​​NRA executive director Wayne LaPierre on behalf of the Second Amendment group’s former ad agency.

It’s unclear how this parallel audit, or the group’s new civil complaint against O’Keefe, will aid or hinder the Westchester DA’s criminal investigation already underway. One former PV executive says that the DA sent a request to Veritas for “all financial docs” relevant to the case back in the second week of April—and another long-serving senior-level member of the group confirmed, saying, “We have complied and given them information.” In all cases, these sources close to Veritas would speak only on the condition of anonymity, citing either legal exposure from the group’s onerous use of nondisclosure agreements or physical threats made by O’Keefe’s incensed fanbase—or both.

Compounding all this scrutiny on O’Keefe’s past financial behavior, Veritas board member Matthew Tyrmand—the far-right Polish nationalist, Steve Bannon protégé, and alleged architect of O’Keefe’s ouster, according to O’Keefe’s diehard defenders—resigned last month.

“I know all what you did, you fkn scumbag,” Tyrmand posted to (what was then called) Twitter in apparent reference to O’Keefe, as their dispute spilled out into the open once again this July. “Only thing keeping me from not airing your bullshit heretofore the last 5 months was being connected to an institution that had other people in it that I was concerned about.”

“(Gonna be a super fun next 6-12 months;)),” Tyrmand concluded.

Tyrmand declined to comment for this article on his apparent threat to unload fresh accusations or further evidence about O’Keefe’s misdeeds, but his potential for new rogue disclosures adds yet another variable to the complex investigation undertaken by the Westchester DA.

What has become clear, however, is that Veritas Chief Financial Officer Tom O’Hara and the remainder of the group’s board hope to lay as much blame as possible at the feet of O’Keefe and Project Veritas’s long-standing tax-preparer, Fairfield, N.J.–area CPA Ed Hulse.

According to sources close to Veritas, the Westchester DA began fanning out investigators and issuing subpoenas last April, in response to the Veritas board’s public claims of O’Keefe’s inurement. Ed Hulse, a close friend of the O’Keefe family described by some Veritas insiders as a “strip mall accountant,” was among those caught in the dragnet.

“Hulse was handed a subpoena because he’s the stupid bastard that signs all the tax returns,” as one former Veritas employee privy to the group’s compliance issues says. “Of course, it’s Tom O’Hara who’s feeding the DA and the current Project Veritas staff all the information to go after James.”

Another senior-level Veritas defector, who often dealt directly with O’Hara, maintains that O’Hara’s role enabling O’Keefe’s self-enrichment was no less direct than Hulse’s.

“O’Hara always had it over James, it was just a matter of when,” this source says. “He knew about James’s inurement since the day he came in.”

The result, evidently, was a Potemkin village of financial propriety. One former staffer recalls O’Hara saying, “Everything looks okay, but if you really look at it, you realize it’s not.” Veritas’s CFO, this source says, took comfort in the fact that it was Ed Hulse’s signature and not his own on the group’s Form 990s to the IRS.

“I have deniability,” the source recalls O’Hara saying.

When reached for comment on this story, O’Hara identified himself via phone, but hung up after hearing initial questions about the Westchester DA’s inquiry. He has not replied to numerous texts regarding further details from this story. Ed Hulse also declined to speak for this article.

Given the scope and sources of these accusations, it is perhaps unsurprising that a third investigation into financial malfeasance at Project Veritas is also underway—this one spearheaded by Hulse himself, and funded by none other than O’Keefe. As early as mid-March, O’Keefe reportedly hired “a new out-of-state legal team” to work with Hulse on investigating irregularities committed by Veritas’s internal financial team and “specifically Tom O’Hara.”

Constrained by limited access to the full records maintained at PV HQ in Mamaroneck, N.Y., the Hulse audit is likely to be handicapped in its efforts to craft a sound counternarrative. Nevertheless, a source close to O’Keefe’s new for-profit venture, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), reports that Hulse has already “discovered many discrepancies and anomaly’s in Tom’s accounting.” One issue sure to be raised in the high-stakes buck-passing to come will be just what duties precisely O’Hara performed as CFO to merit a salary boost from $185,000 to over $227,000 in less than his first full year on the job.

Hulse’s investigation may benefit from breaking news this week that nearly all of Project Veritas’s staff has just been laid off, leaving a whole bunch of newly unemployed dirty tricksters out on the street seeking new venues to vent their frustrations. “SOS Hannah Giles just fired us all,” one posted from Project Veritas’s official X, (formerly Twitter,) account on the way out the door. According to at least one report in conservative media, Veritas CFO Tom O’Hara may be among those now departing the group.

Whatever Hulse’s team unearths, this source close to O’Keefe’s OMG says the onetime chief of America’s “next great intelligence agency” has not fully reckoned with the potential for blowback.

“James is too stupid and arrogant to understand,” this source says, “that whatever is uncovered the Feds can later use as evidence against him.”

Within a month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced during a press briefing that President Biden was traveling to Europe to send a “powerful message that we are prepared and committed to this for as long as it takes.” 

Soon after, other top officials in the administration, including the president himself, began parroting this same message. Yet to this day, it remains unclear to Americans what “victory” means for us in Ukraine.

One theory suggests the United States should facilitate peace talks to prevent the spread of the war from entering a NATO member country. While that’s a just cause, our government has thus far guaranteed a continuous stream of funding and weaponry to Zelensky and scuttled efforts for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. 

Another theory, that proffered by Secretary Blinken, entails removing all Russians from Ukraine, including Crimea, a territory that Ukraine has not controlled since 2014. This mission would require drastically different resources from our government—and it’s one that Congress should debate before sending another dime of assistance to Ukraine. Meanwhile, if this is the mission, Ukraine lacks the means to achieve it. Zelensky has been unable to garner the combat power necessary to achieve that decisive outcome.  

The most radical theory, championed by acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, would entail a war crimes tribunal for Putin, and potentially regime change in Russia. Fundamentally, this approach would require active combat directly with Russia and would be an act of aggression on our part.

Make no mistake, the United States is currently in a proxy war with Moscow. The Biden administration is obligated to inform Americans if its mission is to facilitate a broader war with Russia—and Congress must hold the White House accountable.

To date, Congress has appropriated more than $113 billion to Ukraine, even though it’s impossible to properly allocate resources to a cause without first defining what the United States intends to accomplish. While Zelensky has inspired our support and Ukraine has waged a strong defense, the war has reached a stalemate that ultimately favors Russia. 

To sustain the status quo, war hawks here will doubtless push for another Ukraine supplemental appropriations bill this fall, even as our citizens have grown increasingly skeptical of America’s participation. 

Congress should not contemplate additional funding until the administration provides us with a comprehensive strategy. Instead, I constantly hear war hawks espousing the phrase, “If only Ukraine had more weapons, they could defeat the Russians.” This logic has failed repeatedly. While it is grinding down part of the Russian army, it is destroying Ukraine and depleting their ability to sustain combat.

After Zelensky rallied Ukraine’s defense against the Kremlin’s initial invasion, we were told Javelin missiles would alter the course of the war in Ukraine’s favor. Not long after, certain war hawks claimed a no-fly zone, enforced by the United States Air Force, was the answer to winning the war. Proponents of this policy skipped the details: An American-enforced no-fly zone would effectively declare war against Russia. Our military would not only shoot down Russian planes, but also attack any Russian anti-aircraft systems on the ground.

As the war drags on, calls have grown for “bigger and badder” weapons, shifting from Abrams tanks to long-range missiles to F-16 fighter planes to cluster munitions. As the cost and weapons employed escalates, the Biden administration still parrots the same “as long as it takes” approach without specifying what they want to do.

Meanwhile, the lack of accountability and in-depth media coverage leaves the American people in the dark about our involvement in Ukraine—as was done in prior endless wars.

In recent weeks, NATO issued an announcement from their Vilnius summit stating, “Ukraine’s future is in NATO. We reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO….” 

As a former Army Ranger, I recognize that without a defined mission from the Biden administration, there is no way to develop explicit objectives, allocate the proper resources, hold anyone accountable for failure, or honestly claim “mission accomplished.”

That is precisely how the United States ended up with former President George W. Bush aboard an aircraft carrier flight deck with a “Mission Accomplished” banner draped behind him on May 1, 2003. Everyone knew Bush’s infamous speech was not the end of the war; the United States proceeded to stay in Iraq until officially withdrawing in 2011. Despite this major foreign policy failure, no one has ever been held accountable.

While the circumstances are different, the lessons learned from that moment should be applied now. Congress, and the American people, must be given a mission statement for America’s involvement in Ukraine. It’s the only way to seriously debate our participation and ensure the American people aren’t sleep-walking into another endless war.

After laying off most of its workforce last week, right-wing media group Project Veritas is considering cost-cutting measures like going fully remote and bringing in an outside firm to produce its content.

Project Veritas laid off 25 employees last week, citing financial difficulties. The company has struggled to fundraise after the departure of its founder James O’Keefe earlier this year. By the time of his departure, O’Keefe had become controversial within Project Veritas, with some employees accusing him of being “a power-drunk tyrant” who allegedly squandered company funds on lavish personal expenses. After the layoffs—which employees previously characterized as slashing Project Veritas from 43 to 18 staffers—the company is seeking a profitable path forward, according to sources. And it won’t be easy, management has suggested in a recent conversation.

In post-layoff conversations with staff, Project Veritas board president Joseph Barton has indicated that the company plans to work remotely and part ways with its Mamaroneck, New York, headquarters, people familiar with the talks told The Daily Beast.

Barton, who did not return requests for comment, also indicated that Veritas hopes to cut costs by outsourcing its production to a third-party firm.

Ex-Project Veritas Staffer Claims James O’Keefe’s Party Guests Pooped on the Floor

Production costs were also a concern in a post-layoffs meeting on Friday, during which remaining leadership discussed saving money by “pre-producing” some of the company’s content. Near the end of the meeting, leadership held a “moment of silence” for the workers who’d been laid off the previous day.

CEO Hannah Giles, who assumed leadership of Project Veritas after O’Keefe’s departure this year, told The Daily Beast that the company is considering a number of options to keep it solvent.

“I am streamlining and considering many cost-cutting measures to maintain the long-term sustainability of Project Veritas,” Giles told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “Our internal team will continue to produce the nation’s best investigative journalism.”

Giles did not immediately clarify whether Project Veritas would outsource any of its content creation.

“Project Veritas is in a tough situation,” Giles said. “It was made tough by O’Keefe leaving, and made doubly challenging by mismanagement before I was hired. I wish we could have kept everyone on and grown the organization but I’ve been put in the situation where I have to cut and refocus so we can get to growth. I’m not going to fight in the press over complaints from laid off staffers, I’m going to keep doing the work to rebuild this organization from the mess it was left in.”

In a recent conversation with staff, however, Barton claimed Project Veritas was still not operating sustainably. According to people familiar with the conversation, Barton complained that Giles had been unwilling to lay off as many people as he believed necessary to keep the company’s expenses under control.

Financial concerns have loomed large for Project Veritas under multiple sets of leadership. O’Keefe is accused of spending company funds on dubious personal expenses like chartered cars, helicopter flights, and musical theater productions. Project Veritas is currently suing O’Keefe over this alleged spending, as well as allegations that he used Project Veritas’s donor list to solicit funds for a rival media group after his departure this year. But O’Keefe also served as Project Veritas’s public face during his tenure with the company, and employees told The Daily Beast that the group struggled to fundraise in his absence.

“We all had high hopes for Hannah, so it’s just unfortunate the way things turned out,” former Project Veritas senior investigative reporter James Lalino told The Daily Beast.

Laid-off Project Veritas employees previously alleged to The Daily Beast that the company’s pre-layoff operations were frustratingly opaque, with staffers struggling to obtain information from management about the company’s future.

One of those now-former employees, senior investigative reporter Christian Hartsock, served as the company’s board ombudsman, a role intended to supply staffers greater insight into the board’s discussions.

But Hartsock told The Daily Beast that he was blocked from some of those proceedings after Barton, the board president, started classifying meetings as “special board meetings,” from which Hartsock was barred.

Layoffs Gut Project Veritas: ‘What the F*ck Happened Here?’

“I later found out (second-hand) that those ‘matters discussed’ that night were removing indemnification from journalists (current and former) against criminal and civil litigation as a result of work assigned to them in the field,” Hartsock told The Daily Beast of the first “special board meeting” from which he was excluded.

The Daily Beast reviewed text messages between Hartsock and Barton from Aug. 16. (Project Veritas laid off employees earlier that week on Aug. 14 and again on Aug. 17.) In the texts, Hartsock informed Barton that he hadn’t been invited to a board meeting.

“No shit,” Barton wrote back.

“Can you forward me the invite?” Hartsock asked.

“No,” wrote Barton, who went on to characterize the meeting as “special” and inform Hartsock that “You re not invited.”

Other recent communications from recent employees show them voicing layoff concerns in a company-wide group chat, where Giles was a member. (“Once the sloppily executed layoffs happened, the chat became a firing squad aimed directly at Hannah,” a laid-off employee told The Daily Beast.)

“Lmao. who is making the stories now. Hannah cant figure out Twitter let alone final cut,” one ex-staffer wrote to the group, in reference to the production software Final Cut.

Elsewhere in the chat, Lalino tagged Giles and accused her of telling him the previous day that he would not be laid off.

“Thanks for lying to me yesterday and telling me I wasn’t getting laid off,” he wrote. “Awesome working with you. Thanks for giving it to me straight when I asked, you taught me a valuable lesson about dealing with snakes.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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NASA's VERITAS Venus mission might be on hold, but team members continue to test out its gear here on Earth.

The German Aerospace Center (known by the German acronym DLR), a VERITAS mission partner, is conducting field tests in Iceland this summer, using its airborne F-SAR radar sensor and an infrared imager called V-EMulator to study lava flows. As Venus is expected to have a volcanic surface, the volcanic landscapes of Iceland serve as a strong analog for what VERITAS might find on our neighboring planet.

"Characterizing and measuring the extent and type of volcanic and tectonic processes on Venus is key to understanding the evolution of the surface of Venus and rocky planets in general," Sue Smrekar, the principal investigator for VERITAS at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement.

Related: Here's every successful Venus mission humanity has ever launched

During two weeks of field operations, scientists and researchers from DLR and JPL will use the F-SAR radar system mounted on DLR's Dornier 228-212 aircraft to collect imaging data from Iceland's surface. Simultaneously, teams are collecting data and samples on the ground for laboratory analysis to supplement the radar data.

DLR is also testing V-EMulator, a prototype for the eventual Venus Emissivity Mapper that will be installed on VERITAS (whose name is short for "Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography And Spectroscopy").

"This will be of tremendous help to us in characterizing the mineralogical composition and origin of the major geologic terrains on the Venusian surface when VEM delivers 'true' Venus data during the mission phase," Solmaz Adeli, of DLR's Institute of Planetary Research, said in the same statement.

RELATED STORIES:

— Problems with NASA asteroid mission Psyche delay Venus probe's launch to 2031

— NASA Venus mission VERITAS becomes collateral damage amid budget pressures

— Venus may have supported life billions of years ago

NASA intended VERITAS to launch in 2027, but due to institutional troubles at JPL, among other issues, the mission has been delayed indefinitely. It is expected that VERITAS might launch in the early 2030s, though mission funding has been reduced and further delays might occur.

The agency is also developing another Venus mission, called DAVINCI ("Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging"), which is scheduled to reach the planet in the early 2030s. Europe's EnVision probe, another Venus effort, is expected to get off the ground in that same general time frame as well.

As these three missions show, scientific interest in the second planet from the sun has surged over the past few years. Researchers increasingly view Venus as a possible abode for life, both in the ancient past and in the present day. Life as we know it cannot exist on the planet's scorching-hot surface today, but conditions about 30 miles (50 kilometers) up in the clouds are much more Earth-like.

NASA's VERITAS Venus mission might be on hold, but team members continue to test out its gear here on Earth.

The German Aerospace Center (known by the German acronym DLR), a VERITAS mission partner, is conducting field tests in Iceland this summer, using its airborne F-SAR radar sensor and an infrared imager called V-EMulator to study lava flows. As Venus is expected to have a volcanic surface, the volcanic landscapes of Iceland serve as a strong analog for what VERITAS might find on our neighboring planet.

"Characterizing and measuring the extent and type of volcanic and tectonic processes on Venus is key to understanding the evolution of the surface of Venus and rocky planets in general," Sue Smrekar, the principal investigator for VERITAS at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement.

Related: Here's every successful Venus mission humanity has ever launched

During two weeks of field operations, scientists and researchers from DLR and JPL will use the F-SAR radar system mounted on DLR's Dornier 228-212 aircraft to collect imaging data from Iceland's surface. Simultaneously, teams are collecting data and samples on the ground for laboratory analysis to supplement the radar data.

DLR is also testing V-EMulator, a prototype for the eventual Venus Emissivity Mapper that will be installed on VERITAS (whose name is short for "Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography And Spectroscopy").

"This will be of tremendous help to us in characterizing the mineralogical composition and origin of the major geologic terrains on the Venusian surface when VEM delivers 'true' Venus data during the mission phase," Solmaz Adeli, of DLR's Institute of Planetary Research, said in the same statement.

RELATED STORIES:

— Problems with NASA asteroid mission Psyche delay Venus probe's launch to 2031

— NASA Venus mission VERITAS becomes collateral damage amid budget pressures

— Venus may have supported life billions of years ago

NASA intended VERITAS to launch in 2027, but due to institutional troubles at JPL, among other issues, the mission has been delayed indefinitely. It is expected that VERITAS might launch in the early 2030s, though mission funding has been reduced and further delays might occur.

The agency is also developing another Venus mission, called DAVINCI ("Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging"), which is scheduled to reach the planet in the early 2030s. Europe's EnVision probe, another Venus effort, is expected to get off the ground in that same general time frame as well.

As these three missions show, scientific interest in the second planet from the sun has surged over the past few years. Researchers increasingly view Venus as a possible abode for life, both in the ancient past and in the present day. Life as we know it cannot exist on the planet's scorching-hot surface today, but conditions about 30 miles (50 kilometers) up in the clouds are much more Earth-like.