NASA Designed This Low-Tech Rover to Survive Venus

[Elderberry]

Wired.com by Elizabeth Stinson  gear  09.25.17

Venus is not pleasant. Its surface, approximately 850 degrees Fahrenheit, is hot enough for paper to spontaneously combust. Its atmosphere, an oppressive mix of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sulfur dioxide, is dense enough to crush a submarine. “I like to think of Venus as turning your oven at home onto self cleaning mode, but also filling it with Easy Off,” says Jason Derleth, head of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC), a small slice of the agency that funds the exploration of forward-looking technologies. “That’s still not as toxic as the chemical soup it has as its atmosphere. And it’s still not as hot.”

Earth’s neighbor, while certainly inhospitable to humans, is almost just as rough for robots. The last time a bot visited the surface of Venus was in the mid-80s, when the Soviet Union sent its Vega lander to capture data about the planet’s soil. It lasted for less than an hour. “Planetary scientists are very interested in Venus because the data we have is almost nothing,” says Jonathan Sauder, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Which is why for the last year, Sauder has been working with fellow JPL engineer Evan Hilgemann and others to build a rover that could last on Venus for days, if not weeks or months.

More: https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-low-tech-rover/

[kidd]

Tough challenge.

All organic materials would be unacceptable. Lubricants, plastics, rubber.
Common materials would degrade quickly. Might need to use something like asbestos for wire insulation instead of polymers.
Integrated circuits based on Si and GaAs have operated to 750-900 degrees for 1000 hours.

The rover would need to bring its own power source, as solar power is unavailable on Venus. This would need to be RTG or similar, as batteries will not survive.

Not sure how the atmosphere of Venus would affect scientific instuments

[thackney]

Wired.com by Elizabeth Stinson  gear  09.25.17
 
Venus is not pleasant. Its surface, approximately 850 degrees Fahrenheit, is hot enough for paper to spontaneously combust.Its atmosphere, an oppressive mix of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sulfur dioxide, is dense enough to crush a submarine. “I like to think of Venus as turning your oven at home onto self cleaning mode, but also filling it with Easy Off,” says Jason Derleth, head of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC), a small slice of the agency that funds the exploration of forward-looking technologies. “That’s still not as toxic as the chemical soup it has as its atmosphere. And it’s still not as hot.”

Earth’s neighbor, while certainly inhospitable to humans, is almost just as rough for robots. The last time a bot visited the surface of Venus was in the mid-80s, when the Soviet Union sent its Vega lander to capture data about the planet’s soil. It lasted for less than an hour. “Planetary scientists are very interested in Venus because the data we have is almost nothing,” says Jonathan Sauder, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Which is why for the last year, Sauder has been working with fellow JPL engineer Evan Hilgemann and others to build a rover that could last on Venus for days, if not weeks or months.

More: https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-low-tech-rover/

Hot enough to combust, on earth.  It would not on Venus without Oxygen.

[Elderberry]

Tough challenge.

All organic materials would be unacceptable. Lubricants, plastics, rubber.
Common materials would degrade quickly. Might need to use something like asbestos for wire insulation instead of polymers.
Integrated circuits based on Si and GaAs have operated to 750-900 degrees for 1000 hours.

The rover would need to bring its own power source, as solar power is unavailable on Venus. This would need to be RTG or similar, as batteries will not survive.

Not sure how the atmosphere of Venus would affect scientific instuments

Its powered by springs wound up by the wind.

Those treads are powered via a wind turbine that captures the planet’s whipping wind gusts and stores that power inside springs before distributing to the various systems on the rover. “If you simplify the concept quite a bit, it’s sort of like a windup toy or a clock,” says Hilgemann.