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For a Venus lander mission, active cooling of most of the electronics would be necessary, but it would also need sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers that can stand up to Venus' surface conditions. Trying to keep this stuff from immediate "puddleification" isn't easy, but NASA has just thrown a quarter of a million dollars at a University of Arkansas spinoff to develop Venus-resistant chips for a weird little rover.
Thanks to some earlier National Science Foundation funding, Ozark Integrated Circuits already has a chip that can tick along quite happily at temperatures of up to 350 degrees Celsius. To bump that up to the temperatures required for Venus operation, Ozark is using a silicon carbide substrate, with a secret sauce (literally a secret, for now) for the interconnects that's something much more stable and reliable than either aluminum or copper. Besides the physical hardware, Ozark also has to come up with biasing circuits and reference models to help compensate for high temperature operation.
Does exploration of Venus suffer because it does not seem possible for life to exist there, the way it does for Mars?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @03:03AM
I tried to post a story to the queue as an AC, and it tells me "resource invalid" or something along the line. AC can't send in stories?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 06 2015, @03:11AM
I just tried it as anon and got the same error message:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Thursday August 06 2015, @05:22AM
Seems to be a hiccup as it appears to work on my end.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Thursday August 06 2015, @05:21AM
Sorry for the trouble, I just tested and AC story submission is working. Please reply to this comment or email me if you get this error again.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:48AM
I run into this when replying to posts. It appears to be an issue of time. If you are an AC (not logged in and just posting as AC) you'll run out of time unless it's a short reply (or you copy & paste).
It's almost like the inverse of the "slowdown cowboy" warning. Who knows, maybe the operator in the time check is backwards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:25PM
I used to see this message on a regular basis (posting without being signed into an account) but I haven't seen it in quite a while.
Things that I started doing:
When you get to the Submission page, IMMEDIATELY enter a **tiny** amount of text into the Topic line and into the The Scoop dialog and select a Topic.
Don't even mess with the Your Name line for now.
QUICKLY click PreviewStory, verify no reject message, then click the Back button.
It seems that if you take too long before previewing, the identifying number associated with your effort|that page can expire|get reassigned to someone else trying to submit.
I saw such a thing at Pogson's blog previously.
He was reusing someone else's forum scripts|software and for a while didn't understand exactly what was going on with that.
.
Any lines that have temporary gibberish can now be edited into their final form.
Not necessary, but good ideas:
Have your idea already written out and formatted in a text editor.
(It's handy to have a boilerplate file called Submission.txt with markup tags that can be reused|deleted.)
Paste|drag&drop your text into the The Scoop dialog.
PreviewStory, yada yada yada.
-- gewg_