Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Atmosphere or no atmosphere

The US survived landing on Venus by accident
Gary — (archived)

Raoul said:

>Venus atmosphere is so thick that an early Soviet probe, after deploying its
>parachute, never actually landed (or it took much longer than its batteries).

The 4 atmospheric probes of Pioneer Venus were not intended to survive landing. However one of them survived by accident and continued to send telemetry from the ground for almost an hour (too bad it was not instrumented for actual landing).

Designing and simulating spacecraft to survive landing on Venus is "different". A parachute is actually a liability once the aeroshell has been jettisoned and the spacecraft reaches terminal velocity. A big problem is rejecting heat from the payload's own electronics. Energy from the battery is turned into heat by the payload's electronics. In order to survive Venusian ambient conditions, the vehicle needs to have extremely good thermal insulation (no heat can come in or go out). Consequently the payload must get to the surface as quickly as possible before it cooks from its own waste heat. What we need to do is figure out how to design electronics and hardware that can function at a temperature of 735 deg. K, pressure of 92 bars along with raining sulfuric acid.

Gary

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