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posted by janrinok on Thursday August 06 2015, @02:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the pack-the-sunscreen dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by zeigerpuppy on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:50PM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:50PM (#219072)

    I hope our readers are aware of the entensive exploration of Venus by the Russian Venera missions between the 60s to 80s
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera [wikipedia.org]
    Some of the most haunting photos ever taken were returned by those probes,
    Quite amazing they lasted long enough on the surface to return images using quite old tech.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @04:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @04:05PM (#219124)

    It's funny that 4 of their probes had problems getting the lens caps off. Something about Venus that makes that a difficult problem?