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Instead of thinking of Jupiter as totally inhospitable, let's take a page from this Venus playbook, and aim for exploration of the atmosphere instead, with a robot that floats in the clouds and harvests energy from the wind.
WindBots, or "persistent in-situ science explorers for gas giants," is a conceptual project that just got a US $100,000 grant from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program to make itself slightly less conceptual. The general idea is to find a way to make atmospheric exploration possible for gas giants, where keeping a robot alive for any appreciable amount of time is a challenge.
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The robot itself is still just as conceptual as the image above would suggest, but the notable feature ... are the rotors on the faces of the robot that can spin to create lift or change the robot's direction. Inside, besides a bunch of fancy science instruments, there'd likely be some mechanism to harvest energy from turbulent motion, kind of like what you can find in one of those self-winding wristwatches.
It's the only way to know if we can join the Space Tyrant.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Sunday July 26 2015, @11:24AM
Yeah, also, the idea of a flying robot that looks like a placeholder in a 3D environment might be cool to the "concept artist" but surely something that doesn't look like a cross between Lord Vader's ship and a rubics cube is really going to be better...