ISRO Venus Orbiter Mission (Shukrayaan)

Two years after approval, India's Venus Orbiter Mission is a reviewed design with a budget, a science team and a launch month. The Department of Space Annual Report 2025-26, dated 29 April 2026, records that the Preliminary Design Review has been completed, that a Science Working Group has been constituted and that the mission's Principal Scientist has been declared. The Press Information Bureau (PIB) repeated the target in a government backgrounder of 21 June 2026: the mission is 'targeted for launch in March 2028'. No source found up to 4 November 2026 reports a slip, and none reports flight hardware being assembled or tested.

ISRO's mission page sets out the flight plan. LVM3, ISRO's candidate launch vehicle, is to leave the spacecraft in an elliptical Earth parking orbit of 170 by 36,000 km, so the spacecraft's own engine must finish the departure toward Venus. After Venus Orbit Injection into a loose orbit of 500 by 60,000 km, six to eight months of aerobraking, dipping into the upper atmosphere at each close pass, are to lower it to a science orbit of about 200 by 600 km inclined around 90 degrees, where the instruments are to work for five years. According to the government's 2026 backgrounder, ISRO is undertaking aerobraking and thermal management at Venus for the first time. ISRO's page says the near-polar orbit would give uniform coverage, where earlier Venus missions covered either the south polar region or the equatorial belt.

Two exact dates circulate. Official texts now give only March 2028, or 'by 2028' in the Annual Report, but the days come from ISRO itself. According to Internet Archive captures of 1 October 2024, the earliest archived version of the mission page carried a table of the 'targeted launch window for the VOM': Earth departure on 29 March 2028 and arrival at Venus on 19 July 2028. The table was still online on 1 December 2024 and gone by 6 January 2025; no explanation for the change was found. India Today, the Times of India and, on 19 May 2026, The Week called 29 March the launch date, while The Hindu, on 9 September 2026, used ISRO's own label, 'Earth departure date'. Because the rocket leaves the craft in an Earth parking orbit, lift-off can come before departure from Earth, and ISRO has published no lift-off day. IKI, the Russian partner, gave the launch as 'after 2028' in an overview of 3 October 2025. This page uses March 2028 as the official target.

Work on the idea began long before approval. According to The Hindu, it was born in 2012, and ISRO began preliminary studies after the Department of Space received a 23 percent rise in its 2017-18 budget, seeking payload proposals from research institutes in April 2017. On 30 September 2020 the French space agency CNES announced that France would take part in ISRO's Venus mission, 'scheduled to launch in 2025', a year that none of the ISRO statements found gives. In November 2020 an ISRO official told PTI that 20 instrument proposals had been shortlisted, with collaborative contributions from Russia, France, Sweden and Germany, and that a June 2023 target was under review because of the pandemic. On 9 January 2023 P. Sreekumar, adviser to ISRO's space science programme, said the mission, by then aimed at December 2024, was still 'waiting for formal approval and money', and that 'right now the 2031 window is very good'.

The go-ahead came twenty months later. On 18 September 2024 the Union Cabinet approved the mission for the March 2028 opportunity at Rs 1,236 crore (about €117 million), of which Rs 824 crore (about €77.7 million) is for the spacecraft. ISRO is to develop and launch the spacecraft, which News9 reported in 2025 is to be assembled at the U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru.

Spending has been slow, and Parliament has said so. In its 410th Report, laid on 25 March 2026, the Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment, Forests and Climate Change found that the mission's 2024-25 allocation went unspent, and that the 2025-26 allocation was cut from Rs 50 crore (about €4.7 million) to Rs 29.50 crore (about €2.78 million), of which Rs 5.12 crore (about €483,000) had been spent by 31 January 2026. At that pace, the committee wrote of this mission and the two Chandrayaan missions reviewed with it, their timely accomplishment 'as per the proposed timelines may become challenging'. It also agreed with the department that such missions are iterative, and judged that their cash needs would rise substantially as they moved from initiation to execution. According to Rediff's reading of the full report, the Department of Space told the committee that the spacecraft configuration had been finalised, that the preliminary design review of the payloads and mainframe systems was complete, and that the 2025-26 money was tied to agreements with institutes building instruments. That places the design review before March 2026; The Week and the Times of India later dated its completion to April 2026.

Radar comes first in ISRO's payload list. VSAR, the S-band synthetic aperture radar presented by ISRO's Space Applications Centre, is meant to search for recent and active volcanism, characterise impact craters and map Venus at 20 to 30 m, which ISRO's page calls an order of magnitude better than Magellan. The two official descriptions differ on frequency. ISRO's 2024 page gives 2.5 GHz; the instrument's science lead, Sriram Saran Bhiravarasu, gave 2.385 GHz at the meeting of NASA's Venus Exploration Analysis Group on 6 November 2025, chosen so that VSAR's 12.6 cm wavelength exactly matches Magellan's. That match, with similar viewing geometry, allows one-to-one comparison with Magellan images of the volcanic provinces, about 38 years apart, to look for volcanic activity. The same deck labels the 200 to 600 km orbit 'Phase-B', a design-stage figure.

VARTISS, the second radar, is a low-frequency sounder. In its ionosphere mode it measures the density and height of the topside ionosphere; in its subsurface mode, 9 to 25 MHz in the 2025 deck, it works as an orbital ground-penetrating radar able to detect buried interfaces down to about 1 km, depending on the material. Around the two radars ISRO lists fourteen more Indian instruments, from VSEAM, an imaging spectrometer for hot volcanic spots, clouds and water, to cameras, a lightning receiver, a mass spectrometer, plasma, radiation and dust detectors and a solar soft X-ray spectrometer.

The Swedish contribution comes from a long family of instruments. The Venusian Neutrals Analyzer (VNA), built by the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF), forms one half of the collaborative package VISWAS, beside a Plasma Analyser from the Space Physics Laboratory of ISRO's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. VNA is to measure neutral particles around Venus to study how the solar wind interacts with the atmosphere and how Venus loses its upper atmosphere to space. Its principal investigator, Yoshifumi Futaana, was also responsible for ASPERA-4 on Venus Express, and IRF describes VNA as the ninth generation of its miniature ion and neutral atom instruments.

Accounts of the paperwork behind VNA differ. ISRO's Annual Report says approval to formalise an MoU with IRF came in April 2025, and lists among the year's signed documents an agreement between ISRO and a 'Space Physics Laboratory, Sweden' for a payload on the Venus mission. At the Sweden and India summit in Gothenburg on 17 May 2026, the prime ministers' joint statement, published by the Swedish government, 'welcomed the collaboration' between ISRO and IRF on the mission. India Today and The Week reported a memorandum signed during the visit by ISRO and the Swedish National Space Agency, and the Times of India an agreement signed by Sweden. Neither the joint statement nor the six outcomes of the visit listed by India's Ministry of External Affairs, as reported by IANS, mention such a signing, and at the ministry's briefing that day the Secretary (West), Sibi George, said only that Sweden would be involved. IRF's release of 19 May speaks of deepened collaboration, so the parties and dates of the agreement or agreements are not confirmed from a primary text.

Russia's instrument is VIRAL, the Venus InfraRed Atmospheric gases Linker, from the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI RAN). This solar occultation spectrometer reads sunlight filtered through the planet's limb to profile temperature, gases and haze in and above the clouds and to measure winds between 65 and 140 km. In August 2025 Oleg Korablev of IKI told TASS, as retold by Ridus, that ISRO expected the final unit by March 2027. ISRO's Annual Report says approval to start an implementation arrangement with Roscosmos for VIRAL came in April 2025 and that technical discussions continue; no source found says that arrangement has been signed. IKI's October 2025 overview still says only that the spectrometer is expected to be installed. On 11 September 2026 the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Bakanov, told the Vesti news service that VIRAL is 'our joint equipment' to be placed in orbit around Venus.

France's part in VIRAL is the open question on this page. CNES's release of 30 September 2020 said VIRAL, co-developed with Roscosmos and the CNRS laboratory LATMOS, had been selected by ISRO, and that CNES would coordinate the French part; PTI carried the statement that day and repeated it in November 2020. ISRO's 2024 page says VIRAL 'will be developed by IKI, RUSSIA', ISRO's 2026 report names only IKI and Roscosmos, and Roscosmos in 2026 speaks of a Russian and Indian project. A search of the LATMOS website on 4 November 2026 returned no page for VIRAL. No source found says whether a French contribution continues.

RAVI (Radio Anatomy of Venus Ionosphere), the second collaborative payload, needs no instrument box of its own: as the spacecraft's normal radio signal to Earth passes behind the limb, the bending of its path through the atmosphere and ionosphere gives profiles of electron density, temperature, pressure and number density. ISRO says only that RAVI 'will have a science collaboration with a Germany team'; no German institution has been named in any source found.

An atmospheric probe hangs over the mission without being part of its official plan. The idea is old: in May 2015 former ISRO chairman U. R. Rao told the Deccan Chronicle that the French scientist Jacques Blamont had handed him a report on using large balloons of his design to study the atmosphere of Venus, and that India lacked the expertise to make them. ISRO's 2024 payload list, the cabinet release and the 2025-26 Annual Report name no probe or balloon. In November 2025, however, renders shown by the U R Rao Satellite Centre depicted a domed object on top of the orbiter, which News9 read as an atmospheric probe; the same report said ISRO chairman V. Narayanan had indicated that a probe was still an option, and that Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had indicated the mission would carry one. This page has not traced either remark to a primary record. No mass, instruments, entry design or builder have been published; News9 repeated on 29 April 2026 that ISRO plans a probe, citing no official text. Until ISRO adds it to the payload list, this page treats it as an option under discussion; other unflown Venus ideas are gathered under Venus proposals.

Data are to come home through the DSN32 antenna of the Indian Deep Space Network, and the Indian Space Science Data Centre is to archive them in the PDS4 standard. ISRO has also been building a user community before launch: a national science meet at ISRO Headquarters in Bengaluru on 29 and 30 October 2025 drew about 150 participants, more than 70 of them from outside the Department of Space.

Other agencies are watching the schedule. On 9 September 2026 an ESA director told The Hindu that ESA's Venus science coordination group was speaking to ISRO 'to make sure that the missions complement each other'. The Space Applications Centre's comparison table of November 2025 set VOM's launch year of 2028 against 2031 for NASA's VERITAS and 2032 for the European EnVision, which ESA's own pages put in November 2031. For the orbiters that came before it, see mapping Venus and Akatsuki.