A good watch can take a beating and keep on ticking. With the right parts, can a rover do the same on a planet like Venus?
A concept inspired by clockwork computers and World War I tanks could one day help us find out.
[...] AREE was first proposed in 2015 by Jonathan Sauder, a mechatronics engineer at JPL. He was inspired by mechanical computers, which use levers and gears to make calculations rather than electronics.
By avoiding electronics, a rover might be able to better explore Venus. The planet's hellish atmosphere creates pressures that would crush most submarines. Its average surface temperature is 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius), high enough to melt lead.
[...] Another problem will be communications. Without electronics, how would you transmit science data? Current plans are inspired by another age-old technology: Morse code.
An orbiting spacecraft could ping the rover using radar. The rover would have a radar target, which if shaped correctly, would act like "stealth technology in reverse," Sauder said. Stealth planes have special shapes that disperse radar signals; Sauder is exploring how to shape these targets to brightly reflect signals instead. Adding a rotating shutter in front of the radar target would allow the rover to turn the bright, reflected spot on and off, communicating much like signal lamps on Navy ships.
Mechanical computers and Morse code. The future of Venusian exploration is steampunk.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by qzm on Tuesday August 29 2017, @10:03PM (1 child)
Having trouble?
I would suggest that this is a good example of someone with a cute hobby desperately looking for an application.
There is NO POSSIBLE WAY you can build enough mechanical computation for ANYTHING useful in space exploration - it is not even distantly possible.
Sure, you could build a simple line-follower, perhaps even with enough smarts to backup-and-retry.
But a research probe? Someone has been reading far FAR too much steampunk. You could not even manage the calculations required to point a communications dish back at earth (not to mention what to then use it for..).
Its all rather silly. It is much MUCH easier to build electronics to survive than it is to build mechanics to survive, for a start.
NASA is still caught up in its modern 'we know best about everything, practicality be damned' bloat phase which has bogged down US space science for decades, until it is now being dragged slowly forward by private industry.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 29 2017, @11:27PM
How are you going to communicate with that dish? Sound waves? Analogue computers could handle that problem BTW. It's not that hard.