  Altitude-controlled balloons hold great promise for performing high-priority
scientific investigations of Venus's atmosphere and geological phenomena,
including tectonic and volcanic activity, as demonstrated by a number of recent
Earth-based experiments. In this paper, we explore a concept of operations
where multiple autonomous, altitude-controlled balloons monitor explosive
volcanic activity on Venus through infrasound microbarometers, and autonomously
navigate the uncertain wind field to perform follow-on observations of detected
events of interest. We propose a novel autonomous guidance technique for
altitude-controlled balloons in Venus's uncertain wind field, and show the
approach can result in an increase of up to 63% in the number of close-up
observations of volcanic events compared to passive drifters, and a 16%
increase compared to ground-in-the-loop guidance. The results are robust to
uncertainty in the wind field, and hold across large changes in the frequency
of explosive volcanic events, sensitivity of the microbarometer detectors, and
numbers of aerial platforms.
