Students Designed a Mission to Venus on the Cheap

Sometimes, the best way to learn how to do something is just to do it. That is especially true if you're learning to do something using a specific methodology. And in some cases, the outcome of your efforts is something that's interesting to other people. A team from across the European Union, led by PhD candidate Domenico D'Auria, spent a few days last September performing just such an exercise - and their work resulted in a mission architecture known as the Planetary Exploration Deployment and Research Operation - Venus, or PEDRO-V.