Hacker News Reader

Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

Stay tuned for the Venus mechanical maker challenge:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/events/2019/3/1/mechanical-make...

>With its sulfuric acid clouds, temperatures over 450°C, and 92 times the surface pressure of Earth, Venus is one of the most hostile planetary environments in the solar system. Prior missions have only survived hours! But an automaton (or clockwork mechanical robot) could solve this problem. By utilizing high-temperature alloys, the clockwork rover would survive for months, allowing it to collect and return valuable long-term science data from the surface of Venus.

>Challenge to be announced on July 8, 2019

Question: does NASA have a Venus environmental chamber? They must, right? How big is it?

View on HN

Yes. NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio has one, I believe. They were building it when I was an intern ~6 years ago.

Of course, Glenn also has high temperature electronics. Memory is hard to come by, but simple analog and digital circuits are feasible (enough for data digitization, multiplexing, some forward error correction, and transmission to orbital assets).

Here are a couple papers on the idea of all-high-temperature-electronics designs (which I think are a lot more realistic and effective than a mechanical automaton, as fun as that sounds) for a long duration lander design (can be adapted to a rover, etc, as well) related to the work I did:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201400...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457651...

Cool stuff. One of my roomies in collitch got his Ph.D. with Choyke who I think is still the godfather of high-bandgap semiconductor physics.

Looks like NASA wants to make cpus with Gallium Nitride now:

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-gallium-nitride-processornext-...

From the link:

> ... at the Glenn Research Center. > > The team has already tested the circuits in a Venus simulation chamber — a 14-tonne stainless-steel tank that can imitate the temperature, pressure and specific chemistry of the Venusian surface.

Thanks, I missed that! Sounds pretty cool.

I don't think anyone won the last challenge, which was for making a mechanical camera, because they kept extending the deadline. The requirements for the camera they wanted were pretty stringent. If they were willing to accept different resolutions image shapes then a hacked antique IR camera would win. Old IR cameras mechanically raster scanned a single detector over a scene fast enough for 15 fps video.

This is great, I didn't know they were following up on this concept. I had read an article [0] from 2017 before but wasn't aware of any further developments.

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/space-robots/jp...

It’s called an autoclave...

Ha! If it's roomy, plus 92 atmospheres (plus hot acid clouds!)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com