The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has expanded
Prototype of a robotic balloon -aerobot - may one day "take to the skies of Venus," NASA says on its website. He has already made two test flights in the desert without any problems.
High blood pressure, extreme heat and gasesThe surfaces of Venus make it difficult to prepare any object to be sent there. Even a well-prepared spacecraft can be damaged there within a few hours. So NASA engineers created an unmanned robot. Kilometers above the surface of Venus, there is a place where Venus Aerial can safely move and collect data.
As part of the experiment, a silver balloonflew 1 km over the Black Rock Desert in a place with the Earth's atmosphere, whose temperature and density resembles conditions on Venus. It is they who will undergo Venus Aerial at an altitude of about 55 km above the surface of the planet, JPL engineers said.
“We are very pleased with the performance of the prototype. It demonstrated all maneuvers at a controlled altitude and recovered in good condition after both flights,” said robotics technologist Jacob Israelewitz, who also leads the balloon's development as principal flight test investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“We have recorded tons of data from these flights and look forward to using it to improve our simulations before exploring on the sister planet,” he concluded.
Balloons have previously been used forexploration of Venus in 1985 by two Soviet missions Vega-1 and Vega-2. Both were about 3.6 meters in diameter and lasted about 46 hours in flight before the batteries ran out. However, the short time they lasted helped researchers understand what such equipment was capable of in the atmosphere of Venus.
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