Skip to main content

Can a Venus Lander Survive Longer Than a Few Minutes?

Sending a lander to Venus presents several huge engineering problems. Granted, we’d get a break from the nail-biting entry, descent and landing, since Venus’ atmosphere is so thick, a lander would settle gently to the surface like a stone settles in water — no sky cranes or retrorockets required.

But the rest of the endeavor is fraught with challenges. The average temperature at the surface is 455 degrees C (850 F), hot enough to melt lead. The mix of chemicals that make up the atmosphere, such as sulfuric acid, is corrosive to most metals. And the crushing atmospheric pressure is roughly equivalent to being 1,500 meters (5,000 ft) under water. These extreme environmental conditions are where metals and electronics go to die; therefore, the few Venus lander missions that have made it to the surface — like the Soviet Venera missions — only lasted two hours or less. Any future landers or rovers will need to have nearly super-hero-type characteristics to endure on the surface of Earth’s evil twin.

But there’s one additional challenge that might be close to being solved: creating batteries that can operate long enough in Venus’ hellish conditions to make a lander mission worth the effort.

NASA is working with a company called Advanced Thermal Batteries, Inc. (ATB) and together they created the first battery that has demonstrated the capability to operate at Venus’ temperatures for an entire Venus solar day, which is approximately 120 Earth-days.

Test battery hardware: High temperature thermal batteries adapted for the Venus surface. Image Credit: Dr. Michael Barclay, Advanced Thermal Batteries, Inc.

The battery is based on short-lived thermal battery systems used for powering smart missiles, The battery contains 17 individual cells and uses specifically designed chemistry and structural materials While the battery is still in development, engineers are encouraged that tests conducted demonstrate that these types of batteries are capable of operating in harsh environments like on Venus. Additionally, this advanced type of battery technology may provide a new energy storage device for future exploration in harsh environments across the Solar System.

“This recent battery technology demonstration, with improved architecture and low self-discharge electrochemistry, is a huge accomplishment that many may have not thought possible,” said Dr. Kevin Wepasnick, ATB Project Engineer, in a NASA press release.

Batteries appear to be the only solution for powering a Venus lander. Solar panels are not viable due to surface light levels being comparable to an overcast day on Earth, and current solar panel designs would not withstand the high surface pressures. A radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) requires bringing a heat source to the surface of Venus, and since heat management is already a major mission challenge, this method is not a good option.

But on Venus, thermal batteries can utilize the ambient atmospheric conditions to heat a special high-temperature electrolyte that is solid and inert at standard room temperature. Additionally, they can remain operational without the need for pyrotechnics or thermal insulation.

NASA says this new battery approach has demonstrated high-temperature operation for unprecedented periods of time, and lays the foundation for a new paradigm in battery technology and for Venus landers.

Conceptual image of Long-Lived In situ Solar System Explorer (LLISSE) on the Venus compared to larger traditional landers. Image Credit: John Wrbanek, NASA GRC.

The work on the new type of thermal battery is part of ongoing work at NASA Glenn Research Center to develop a small Venus lander called the Long-Lived In situ Solar System Explorer (LLISSE). The program uses the latest advances in high-temperature systems and a novel concept of operations to allow operations on the surface of Venus for 60 days or longer while the lander collects science data and transmits it to a Venus orbiter.

LLISSE is intended to be approximately 10 kg (22 lbs) and carry a suite of small sensors to measure winds, radiance, temperature, pressure, and abundances of key atmospheric chemical constituents. LLISSE will be a complete system with electronics, communications, and instrumentation—all of which will require a battery to operate.

ATB says they expect that a complete prototype Venus battery system will be demonstrated in the next 18 months.

Read more about the new battery here.

The post Can a Venus Lander Survive Longer Than a Few Minutes? appeared first on Universe Today.



from Universe Today https://ift.tt/BF4WPVu
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Magnetohydrodynamic Drive Could Lead to Fuel Stations on Mars

Within the next fifteen years, NASA, China, and SpaceX plan to send the first crewed missions to Mars. In all three cases, these missions are meant to culminate in the creation of surface habitats that will allow for many returns and – quite possibly – permanent human settlements. This presents numerous challenges, one of the greatest of which is the need for plenty of breathable air and propellant. Both can be manufactured through electrolysis, where electromagnetic fields are applied to water (H 2 O) to create oxygen gas (O 2 ) and liquid hydrogen (LH 2 ). While Mars has ample deposits of water ice on its surface that make this feasible, existing technological solutions fall short of the reliability and efficiency levels required for space exploration. Fortunately, a team of researchers from Georgia Tech has proposed a “ Magnetohydrodynamic Drive for Hydrogen and Oxygen Production in Mars Transfer ” that combines multiple functionalities into a system with no moving parts. This syst...
Post a Comment
Read more

SETI Researchers Double-Checked 1 Million Objects for Signs of Alien Signals

We can’t help ourselves but wonder about life elsewhere in the Universe. Any hint of a biosignature or even a faint, technosignature-like event wrests our attention away from our tumultuous daily affairs. In 1984, our wistful quest took concrete form as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence . Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, SETI has turned up nothing. Recently, scientists used a powerful new data system to re-examine data from one million cosmic objects and still came up empty-handed. Did they learn anything from this attempt? This effort used COSMIC , which stands for  Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster . It’s a signal-processing and algorithm system attached to the Karl G. Jansky  Very Large Array  (VLA) radio astronomy observatory. According to SETI, it’s designed to “search for signals throughout the Galaxy consistent with our understanding of artificial radio emissions. “ Modern astronomy generates vast volumes of data and al...
Post a Comment
Read more

A New Technique Has Dramatically Improved ALMA’s Resolution

To those familiar with optical telescopes, the idea of doing something to achieve higher resolution with their telescope may seem alien, if not, then practically impossible. A telescopes resolution is determined by among other things, its aperture – diameter of the thing that collects light (or electromagnetic radiation) and of course you can’t easily change that. Enter the team at ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array who have become the first to use the Band 10 receiver and extreme separation of the receivers to boosting its resolution so they can see detail equivalent of detecting a 10 meter long bus on the Moon! The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (otherwise known as ALMA) is based upon interferometer technology which, in its simplest terms, takes a number of telescopes, hooks them together and gives them the same amount of resolution as if the instrument was the same diameter as the distance between the component parts! If that blew your mind then let me explain;...
Post a Comment
Read more