if you've watched this channel enough you might get the impression that I hate
Venus it's possible just possible that I've even suggested that the planet is
so terrible it should be pushed into the Sun the reality of course is that it's
an incredibly fascinating world the closest twin to the earth that we
have in the solar system it's nearly the same mass and has the same surface
gravity while Earth is the beautiful life filled world that we all enjoy
venus is a tortured hellscape with temperatures hot enough to melt zinc
with atmospheric pressure it's more than 93 times what we experienced here on the
surface of Earth and I always forget about the sulfuric acid rain the Soviets
sent a series of Landers to a horrible demise for a glimpse of the surface of
Venus in the 70s and 80s but nobody's been back since there have been new
techniques and technologies in development that might make a serious
exploration of the surface of Venus possible again exploration that could
help us understand why the planet went so horribly horribly wrong it's believed
that Venus was once milder and wetter in its early history
a recent study simulated that Venus could have actually been habitable until
now but at some point in its past an extreme volcanic event turned the planet
surface inside out shutting down any plate tectonics it had filling the
atmosphere with carbon dioxide that led to a runaway greenhouse effect and
created the hellscape that we see today but scientists have so many questions
did it ever have oceans that could Harbor life was the early atmosphere on
Venus similar to the early Earth when did it diverge why does Venus
rotates so slowly and did this cause it to lose its planetary magnetosphere why
does its atmosphere rotate so quickly compared to the rotation speed of the
planet itself what caused this volcanic resurfacing
and did it cause the runaway greenhouse effect did it only happen once or was it
a regular occurrence will it happen again like I said so many questions and
mission planners have tried to get answers we did a whole episode on the so
V Venera program and their tragic luck
with lens caps of the 14 attempted landings on Venus only nine were
successful the last spacecraft to land on the surface of Venus was the Soviet
Vega 2 Lander it survived for 56 minutes drilled into a rock sent some data back
home and died any Rover or Lander sent to Venus has enormous challenges first
it needs to be able to handle constant temperatures above 460 Celsius even on
the tallest peaks on Venus the temperatures are still 390 Celsius
because of the thick atmosphere there's very little solar irradiance available
for solar panels down on the surface this scatters away light in the short
wavelength of the spectrum the lower the altitude the worse it gets a standard
triple Junction cell solar panel would get 550 watts per square meter at high
altitude but would only get 37.4 watts at 10 kilometres altitude and only 8.7
watts down at the surface 160th the amount of energy available to a Lander
or Rover compared to an orbiter and of course there's the corrosive atmosphere
the sulfur in the atmosphere reacts with copper and many other metals turning
them into sulfides interestingly 304 stainless steel is one
of the most resistant in the Venusian atmosphere that's the same stuff the
SpaceX starships made out of considering these hazards who's actually working on
missions to the surface of Venus the longest in the works is the Russian
Venera Deen mission which was proposed back in 2003 and was supposed to launch
back in 2013 but was pushed back and probably now won't launch until 2026
or even 2030 one the mission would consist of an orbiter and a lander the
orbiter would spend a couple of Earth days studying the cloud tops of Venus
measuring the planet's greenhouse effect winds thermal ties magnetosphere and how
quickly its atmosphere is escaping off into space driven by the Sun solar wind
it might also be equipped with two balloons that would remain aloft in
Venus's clouds studying the Atmos fear from within surviving for over a
week the balloons could drop Micro probes which would sample the atmosphere
as they fell to the surface over 30 minutes and Venera D would be equipped
with a 170 kilogram Lander its job would be to study the surface of Venus as well
as its atmosphere and learn about how the to interact with each other it was
originally hoped that heat-resistant electronics could be used to allow the
lander to survive on the surface of Venus for up to a month but it might
turn out that's too expensive to develop in 2017
NASA joined forces with the Russians working on Venera D helping to define
science objectives and considering how they could provide instruments or
additional Rovers and Landers to the mission how do you get a lander to
survive in those kind of temperatures you could bring fuel to cool a lander
down a recent two to three billion dollar flagship mission to Venus was
proposed to use a liquid gas cooling system to keep a lander alive for one
entire day like one Earth Day not of a new Xion day an additional idea would be
to use a radio isotopic thermoelectric generator the same kind of nuclear
battery on board curiosity New Horizons and the Voyager missions while the RTG
helps keep curiosity's electronics warm on Mars it would power a cooling system
for a Venus Lander what if you could have a spacecraft that
could stay alive on the surface of Venus for up to 60 days without active cooling
that's the goal of the long-lived in-situ solar system Explorer or Lise
this would be a 10 kilogram probe that would operate for half an entire day on
Venus it would show up in the late afternoon
and watch how day turns tonight in hell now that doesn't sound like much but
we're talking about 60 earth days of survival on Venus over the course of
this punishing period it would measure the surface wind speed and wind
direction the surface temperature and pressure and the chemicals in the
atmosphere near the surface it would also be able to measure how the amount
of sunlight reaching the surface changes the key is that it would be able to
measure this over a long time see how it changes engineers are
proposing that the lander could be carried as part of a balloon payload and
then dropped off when it's over the ideal terrain it can also enter the
atmosphere directly with its own entry shell one idea is to have the lander
operate with battery power which could keep it alive on the surface for about
125 days if it transmits only two minutes of data every eight hours but
another idea would be to use wind power allowing it to operate indefinitely
the key to this entire mission is a range of new electronics developed to
survive high temperatures originally designed for sensors that could survive
inside jet engines NASA now has integrated circuits made with silicon
carbide seven conductors that can function for thousands of hours at 500
Celsius in a recent test circuits survived in a simulated Venus surface
environment for over 21 days the spacecraft is going to be small just 25
centimeters across too small unfortunately to even have a camera so
we'll never know what it's actually seeing down there it could be one of the
payloads for the Venera D spacecraft I mentioned earlier or it could travel to
Venus as part of another mission or on its own there are still more creative
ideas to explore the surface of Venus and we'll get to that in a second but
first I'd like to thank Michael Hickman Marc Lacey and the rest of our 842
patrons for their generous support educational content should be freely
available to anyone in the world and the patrons make this possible join our
community at patreon.com slash universe today and get in on the action another
radical idea for exploring the surface of Venus is to move away from heat
sensitive electronics as much as possible and take inspiration from
steampunk this is a clockwork Rover called the otamatone Rover for extreme
environments or re it was proposed by Jonathan solder a mechanic's engineer at
JPL it uses a similar track layout to a world war 1 tank so it can recover and
keep going if it rolls wind powered mechanical gears would replace
electronics allowing it to survive as long as a year on the surface of Venus
in order to maneuver around the chaotic Venusian terrain and
years originally considered the locomotion of the bizarre-looking
wind-powered stron beasts developed by Dutch artist
Theo Hanson they also considered a six wheeled version with a windmill on top
inspired by the Soviet Venera cod and Mars a cod Rover concepts but they
switched to the idea of tracked motion based on the tanks that could cross
trenches and craters in World War one instead of batteries
the rover would store wind energy with metal or composite coiled Springs
although the energy density is very low they'd be highly resistant to extreme
temperatures and be reliable in the extreme environment so how do you
communicate without electronics the engineers proposed putting a target on
the rover that would reflect radar signals from an orbiter flying overhead
the rover would then put a rotating shutter in front of the target sending
signals in Morse code that can be read overhead the team actually considered if
it would be possible to build the entire Rover with this kind of clockwork
technology but in the end they settled on a hybrid concept incorporating some
of the high-temperature electronics I mentioned earlier here's one last idea
that I really like it's called the Venus land sailer zephyr designed by a nasa
team that includes dr. Jeffery Landis Landis has made several proposals for
Venus missions in the past including a Stirling engine powered Rover that would
slowly let the heat of Venus into the rover's electronics like a reverse
refrigerator even though the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is
almost 100 times greater than Earth there are winds they're slow moving less
than one meter a second or 3.6 kilometers per hour but with Venus's
intense pressure they develop a significant force the Soviet Venera ten
spacecraft found a vast landscape that was almost perfectly flat from Horizon
to Horizon with tiny rocks not much bigger than a few centimeters and is
this kind of flat landscape with a constantly blowing wind that would be
perfect for land sailer the land sailer would be pretty big weighing about 250
kilograms with an 8 meter tall airfoil sail it would carry about 25 kilograms
in science equipment and the designer think they could return about two
gigabytes of science data over a 30 day mission it would also take advantage of
the high temperature resistant silicon carbide electronics its body would be
made of titanium to resist the corrosive atmosphere an
orbiter would fly overhead acting as a relay back to earth but the Zephyr would
need to make a lot of decisions autonomously as it rolls about 4
centimeters per second across the terrain venus will be one of the most
complicated and challenging places in the solar system that humanity could
ever try to explore it'll require new advancements in high temperature high
pressure corrosion resistant materials and maybe even new methods of locomotion
never tried out on any other world but the payoff will be worth it
Venus could have been like earth for vast periods of time before things went
horribly wrong it's the closest we've got to a twin
planet and the more we learn about Venus the more we learn about what makes earth
so habitable it's definitely time to go back to Venus what do you think let me
know your thoughts in the comments here are the names of the patrons who support
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navigating the hellish surface of Venus will be challenged a completely
different challenge will be soaring above the surface of Mars with all kinds
of balloons gliders and airplanes and here's a video we did on that subject