Venus is hellish. Super hot temperatures and a crushing corrosive atmosphere have made short work of all the probes that have so far landed on the planet. But there may be a solution, even if it looks like something out of a steampunk novel.
Sauder and his engineers first considered instruments that could measure temperature and pressure using basic physical properties like thermal coefficients of expansion, mechanical seismometers, and even recording their data on a golden record that would loft up with a balloon to an orbiting spacecraft. (“Too much of a Rube Goldberg,” he concluded.) They flew Jansen to California to consult about a spider-legged walking robot, though the artist told them that his Strandbeests tend to fail on landscapes that aren’t a flat beach. Eventually, though, reality intervened. High-temperature electronics being developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio were capable of taking much better measurements than the group anticipated, beating anything a mechanical instrument could do.
One area that’s still lagging is developing cameras that won’t melt on our sister world. Mars rovers use detailed image processing for their obstacle-avoidance programs, but without the ability to take high-quality pictures, such a package would be hard to adapt for Venus. So the JPL engineers are currently developing a concept they call the Hybrid Automaton Rover-Venus (HAR-V, or Har-vee) that would essentially be a wind-driven, wheeled mobility platform capable of carting sensitive electronics around for up to 120 days. Like a boat, it could “sail” with the wind and follow the breeze to navigate.
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