A conventional approach to a Venus rover like this is difficult, expensive, and potentially dangerous, but a team of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, Calif., have come up with an innovative new idea for exploring the surface of Venus. If the problem is the electronics, why not just get rid of them, and build a mechanical rover instead?With funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, the JPL team wants to see whether it might be possible to build a Venus exploration rover without conventional sensors, computers, or power systems. The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) would use clockwork gears and springs and other mechanisms to provide the majority of the rover’s functionality, including power generation, power storage, sensing, locomotion, and even communication: no electronics required. Bring on the heat.
Very steampunk. Can a spark transmitter reach an orbiter? Bandwidth will be horrible but there probably won't be much to send.
More details on this from a FISO telecon presentation on May 24th, 2017 with Jonathan Sauder and Evan Hilgemann from JPL. Audio & slides links below.Presentation SlidesMP3 Audio Presentation
"The NIAC program is designed to let technologists stretch and create concepts that have never been considered by NASA before," said NIAC program executive Jason Derleth, adding that ideas can come from universities, businesses or garage inventors. Still, proposals must be based on "solid scientific and engineer principals and to advance NASA's mission objectives," he adds. An example of that is Adrian Stoica's folding mirror probe, that would create a "solar oasis" on the moon, approved for fuding at a prior NIAC symposium.The most interesting project is AREE (Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments), a Venus probe. Since our unfriendly neighbor of a planet can hit 842 degree F temperatures and 90 times Earth's atmospheric pressure, most electronics would be dead on arrival.AREE would actually use Venus' conditions to its advantage by taking power from the wind and tapping a mechanical computer. A radar reflecting piston would move up and down to transmit surface "data" as morse code, which could be picked up by "repeater" balloons and transmitted to Earth from an orbiter.
More here.https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/28/nasa-futuristic-probes-niac/
More here.NASA goes Steampunk for its future Venus probesQuote"The NIAC program is designed to let technologists stretch and create concepts that have never been considered by NASA before," said NIAC program executive Jason Derleth, adding that ideas can come from universities, businesses or garage inventors. Still, proposals must be based on "solid scientific and engineer principals and to advance NASA's mission objectives," he adds. An example of that is Adrian Stoica's folding mirror probe, that would create a "solar oasis" on the moon, approved for fuding at a prior NIAC symposium.The most interesting project is AREE (Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments), a Venus probe. Since our unfriendly neighbor of a planet can hit 842 degree F temperatures and 90 times Earth's atmospheric pressure, most electronics would be dead on arrival.AREE would actually use Venus' conditions to its advantage by taking power from the wind and tapping a mechanical computer. A radar reflecting piston would move up and down to transmit surface "data" as morse code, which could be picked up by "repeater" balloons and transmitted to Earth from an orbiter.https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/28/nasa-futuristic-probes-niac/
Electronics made from silicon carbide (SiC) may work up to about 500°-600° C. Although NASA would have to pay for development of the technology and design of the chips.http://www.analog.com/en/analog-dialogue/articles/high-temperature-electronic-pose-design-challenges.htmlEditI found NASA Glenn was working on this in 2012https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/cdtb/aboutus/workshop2012/Presentations/Session%203.%20Distributed%20Engine%20Control/DEC_04_Beheim.pdf
For the power source why not get the Venus temperature to work for you.Using a pressurised liquid (probably solid for most of the trip) from Earth let the heat run a steam engine or turbine, which can drive a generator. The liquid does not have to be water, but the most suitable material for Venus, possibly a metal or salt.If well designed the steam engine will also be able to cool the lander at the same time.
It's not a high temperature you need to extract useful energy, it's a difference in temperature. Steam engines work by extracting power from the movement of heat from the boiler to the outside world.If you're sitting on the surface of Venus, everything around you is at the same high temperature. So you can't extract any energy from it. It's one of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics.
Quote from: colbourne on 11/23/2017 05:00 amFor the power source why not get the Venus temperature to work for you.Using a pressurised liquid (probably solid for most of the trip) from Earth let the heat run a steam engine or turbine, which can drive a generator. The liquid does not have to be water, but the most suitable material for Venus, possibly a metal or salt.If well designed the steam engine will also be able to cool the lander at the same time.It's not a high temperature you need to extract useful energy, it's a difference in temperature. Steam engines work by extracting power from the movement of heat from the boiler to the outside world.If you're sitting on the surface of Venus, everything around you is at the same high temperature. So you can't extract any energy from it. It's one of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics.
There was a April 19, 2017 FISO Presentation for "An Air-Breathing Metal-Combustion Power Plant for Venus in situ Exploration" with Michael Paul from Johns Hopkins APL. Audio & slides links below.Presentation SlidesMP3 Audio PresentationAn internal combustion engine with Lithium as fuel and CO2 from the Venusian atmosphere as oxidizer.
JPL has a reputation for barking mad engineering ideas. Many years ago I saw a presentation for a long-lived Venus lander that would refrigerate itself using a massive RTG running about 3 times as hot as any current technology.
At the time, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab was making an attempt to break JPl's monopoly on planetary probes. They proposed a system where the Pu-238 would run a cooling system by direct heating, like the old gas-fired refrigerators that used an ammonia cycle. Of course ammonia wouldn't work on Venus, so they proposed to test several alternative fluids. This was proposed for this Discovery Program, which had a goal of 3 yrs from selection to launch!!!!
The problem with these proposals is that there is very little scientific interest in the surface of Venus which seems to be all basaltic rocks of about the same age.