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posted by janrinok on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:01AM   Printer-friendly

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.
...
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Popeidol on Monday July 27 2015, @04:32AM

    by Popeidol (35) on Monday July 27 2015, @04:32AM (#214069) Journal

    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:

    • While Jupiter is huge, it's still a sphere. You should be able to see a hell of a lot of it from orbit and the further out the orbit is the less of a problem atmosphere will be with communication.
    • The windbot seems to be at least partially steerable and travelling out of view would take a long, long time. Keeping it within view of one geostationary orbit seems possible.
    • The orbiter being out of sight of earth might not be a problem. The windbot is operating in a dynamic environment 30-60 light minutes away from us, so to work at all it's going to have to be highly autonomous and able to handle unexpected situations without input. Google tells me the Jupiter day is about 10 hours, so the orbiter would typically only need to cache data for a few hours before it could broadcast it again?
    • The broadcasting-while-tumbling issue I have no idea about. It's probably a topic that's been looked at before though, so they probably have some papers floating around about gyroscopically stabilising antennas or picking up weak non-directional broadcasts or choosing the optimal wavelength to minimise interference from natural sources.

    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.

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