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 takyon on Sunday July 26 2015, @02:47PM
I'd be shocked if they didn't communicate with an orbiter relay, like the Mars rovers.
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(Score: 2) by Bytram on Sunday July 26 2015, @07:35PM
Alternatively, a geostationary comms orbiter might work, but the there is the problem that Jupiter spins on its own axis and would periodically be out of sight from Earth.
well, how about puttin comm relays at botht the leading and trailing lagrange points?
Well, there is still the issue that the floating 'lander', if tumbling, is still going to have a challenge maintaing a stable line-of-site to any of these relays.
So, we're back to the original issue -- how do they DO that?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 27 2015, @12:16AM
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/windbots-persistent-in-situ-science-explorers-for-gas-giants [nasa.gov]
There's not much information.
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(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Monday July 27 2015, @04:32AM
I'm about as far from an expert as it's possible to be and horrifically oversimplifying everything, but some of those problems should be surmountable:
NASA has a lot of expertise at talking to tiny objects very far away, so I think they'll sort that part out. The 'autonomous self-powered upper-atmosphere drone in a hostile environment' is probably going to take up most of their time.