This is a Strandbeest.
These wind-powered mechanical creations can walk, store energy, and even react to their
environment.
These creatures are awesome and amazing in the way they operate, and that it's all through
a mechanical system that you can see and observe.
And understand how it works
If it was up to this NASA JPL engineer, these self-propelled creatures would be exploring
one of the most mysterious planets in our solar system.
Venus is the exoplanet in our own backyard,
The really important reason for going to Venus is to complete our picture of terrestrial
planets with atmospheres in our own solar system
so that we know which planets in other star systems could potentially harbor life.
We just need to find a way to survive Venus’ unforgiving environment, where lead melts
and most electronics are destroyed before even touching the ground.
What that means is we have to completely rethink how a rover would operate and be designed
to work.
What I want is a Strandbeest on another planet.
Venus—often called Earth’s evil twin—is a total mystery to us, despite having a similar
size and composition to our planet.
It was actually the first planet to be explored by a spacecraft.
But after more than 50 years of studying Venus with probes and landers, it seems we’ve
only barely scratched the surface.
I mean we know basic information about the atmosphere, what's the makeup of it.
We have very limited information.
Part of that is because it's shrouded in clouds,
which makes it very hard to observe the planetary surface.
The other challenge is that there's just been a handful of spacecraft that have traveled
to Venus
After several attempts, the Soviet Union’s Venera space program safely landed its first
spacecraft on the planet in 1970.
They sent more spacecraft over the next decade,
with the longest surviving mission operating on the surface for just 127 minutes.
As you descend, both the pressure and the temperature builds until you get to nearly
100 times that of Earth's pressure and 465 degrees Celsius.
That's hot enough where lead and solder would melt, and paper would spontaneously combust.
These inhospitable conditions have made it easier to study planets much farther away
rather than the one right in our backyard.
We know quite a bit about Earth, and we're constantly learning more and more about Mars,
Venus is extremely under-explored
By understanding these three sets of planets, we can do what's known as comparative planetology
to be able to help extrapolate what makes the conditions for life or against life
to help answer one of those fundamental questions.
Are we alone?
While the jury is still out on that one, both public and scientific interest are at a turning
point for Venus.
NASA recently approved two missions to study the planet’s atmosphere and map its surface
after not sending a dedicated spacecraft there in more than 30 years.
But those missions aren’t meant to survive on the surface.
Jonathan believes that what we need is a presence on the ground.
We absolutely have to do surface investigations on Venus and that's because there's
some questions that you just can't answer when you're farther away,
Eventually, you need to get down to the surface and really look at
things that you're not going to be able to see from a distance.
Remember, we’re talking about hellish conditions here.
NASA can’t just send one of their Mars rovers to Venus.
For each planetary condition, you need to design a unique application for how you explore
That’s where this radically new rover comes in.
The Hybrid Automaton Rover-Venus combines a little bit of steampunk with spacecraft
to create a clockwork rover.
Jonathan’s concept for HAR-V went through NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program,
which incubates ideas that have the potential to shake up space exploration.
We originally started off with a walking rover that looked a lot like Theo Jansen Strandbeest,
but after we talked with Theo, he advised us against the legs.
That eventually moved us to a four-wheeled rover concept, using compliant wheels and that
would allow us to drive on the surface of Venus.
The original idea was an entirely mechanical creation.
But after trial and error, the team found that tackling the most basic challenges like
power, navigation, and data collection required a slightly different approach.
The answer?
A stripped down hybrid system.
So, the HAR-V rover takes a very simplified approach to your standard Mars rover
Basically, we have the mechanical system, which does a lot of the driving, the operations,
and the exploration of Venus.
And then there are a subset of electronics that are designed for high temperature, made
out of things like silicon carbide and gallium nitride.
And these can actually operate at extremely high temperatures, above that of the surface
of Venus,
Which will help this rover collect data like its Mars cousins do, but HAR-V’s hardware
will be pared down in comparison.
This means the rover will have to do much of the operations on its own
no humans at the wheel.
So the idea is an observe-and-report rover
It's likely that it would just be a continuous transmission, where you're just constantly
saying, "This is what I'm seeing," and cycling through different instruments.
But Jonathan and his team still have to solve a major problem.
The high-temperature electronics have the computational ability of a solar powered calculator,
so they can only tackle basic processes.
To traverse the Venus landscape, the team is looking to one of the planet's most abundant
resources for a boost...
wind.
So the wind seems to be the best approach for navigating the surface of Venus with then
a mechanical obstacle-avoidance detection system that would sense obstacles in the near
term, including holes, rocks, and cliffs that the rover couldn't drive over and overcome.
If conditions are right, HAR-V could even withstand the harsh elements on Venus for
up to 120 days, far surpassing the Soviet record of just over two hours.
HAR-V handles the temperature by being built
out of stainless steel and titanium alloys, which can operate at these extremely high
temperatures and are impervious to the sulfuric acid content in the atmosphere
Now, HAR-V doesn’t simply exist on the computer.
Jonathan and his team have actually started putting the design to the test.
So what we have here is what we call a Representative Rover Prototype.
Now you'll notice it looks pretty different then the images of the CAD model or what anything
you'd expect to see driving on Venus.
What we're primarily demonstrating here is our mechanical drive system; the ability to
detect an obstacle with our simple bumper here out the front, and the ability to reverse,
back up, and continue to drive forward after we've detected that obstacle.
The prototype does a fine job with rocks, but Jonathan’s got a lean team to work with,
so they crowdsourced ideas for a sensor to detect hills and holes.
Then they waited…
We were completely blown away by the response
We had architects.
We had artists, as well as engineering students and tinkerers.
I would've been thrilled with 50 concepts even, but instead we got over 500 concepts
submitted.
One of the incredible things about HAR-V is that, because it is mechanical
And we're trying to look at how to do things in a simpler way
whenever I'd talk to people about it, they connect with it in a different way and understand it and
start even giving ideas of how to do different operations
At the moment, the conceptual design for HAR-V is about 95% complete.
While Jonathan and his team are still working out the final details, he’s already imagining
what HAR-V might uncover.
One is helping us understand the geologic variations across Venus and that can help
give you a lot of information for why the planet is the way it is.
Why is there a planet that's so similar to Earth in size, in location in the solar system,
but so extremely different from Earth?
How did Venus take this other backstory or change into this really hostile environment?
Of course, there’s also the search for life beyond Earth.
We often hear the term life as we know it but what about life as we don't know it?
How could that exist, and what would it look like?
Venus has been our underexplored sibling for so long, but that’s all about to change.
I should clarify that, scientifically, Venus is not an exoplanet, right?
An exoplanet is around another star.
Basically, it's a planet that's very different from Earth but similar enough that we might
expect it to harbor life, if we saw it around another star.