Venus is not a nice place. The atmosphere is basically all carbon dioxide, it rains acid, and the surface temperature is about 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite being closer than Mars, no space probe has touched down on Venus since the mid 1980s. Why would we bother? Your typical spacecraft would last a few hours at most before succumbing to the extreme conditions. To explore the Venusian surface, we'd have to bring something very atypical.
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| Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech |
Enter the
Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments. This isn't a copy of the rovers currently trundling around Mars. This would basically be a tank. No, seriously, it even looks like a WWI-era tank. But the big thing is that most of it would be mechanical, not electronic. Electronics are too fragile for Venus, unless they're buried deep inside, away from the heat. The rover would mostly rely on wind for power, and would communicate with an overhead orbiter using, essentially, Morse code. The people behind the concept believe they could get nearly a year of research out of the rover before the Venusian environment proves too much. Not a huge amount of time, but definitely better than a couple of hours.
I really hope this particular concept becomes a reality. I don't know, I just think there's something really cool about it. It's very outside the box. We think of space travel as the cutting edge of technology, but in the case of Venus, the environment is so relentlessly terrible that you have to think in the opposite direction. Don't get fancy, get simple. Don't send a delicate, spindly little thing, send a tank.
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