Born from the wind of imagination, an innovative new project to provide a swarm of small spacecraft to explore Venus’s dense atmosphere has just received an encouraging financial boost from funding dollars from NASA to the tune of $ 500,000.
According to a press release from NASA, scientists at the Ohio Aerospace Institute (OAI) designed these tiny rising sensors that they appropriately named Lofted Environmental and Atmospheric Venus Sensors (LEAVES), which will spread to Venus as cosmic kites and then transfer data to Earth.
While the idea may sound a bit far-fetched, the space agency believes this concept could bring rewards due to the low cost and expendable nature of the mission, given the hostile components of the upper and middle Venusian atmospheres and the absurdly high surface area of the neighboring world. . air pressure.
Researchers who presented LEAVES as a viable project explained that the high-tech machines would fall from an orbital spacecraft and gently float down through the dangerous sulfuric acid clouds.
During their descent, each miniature sensor platform detected any chemicals and compounds found and sent that information back to the revolving probe. As a result of the dangerous nine-hour drop, this flight will end in their demise, caused by falling too low to obtain meaningful data or eventually disintegrating through the planet’s toxic levels of carbonyl sulfide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide.
As described in the press release: “With a mass per unit of only 130 g, this concept is ideal as a secondary payload or enhancement for an orbiting Venus mission and is capable of obtaining important data on the dynamic state and composition. of Venus’ atmosphere difficult to access with remote techniques.This Phase II effort will mature the findings of Phase I by participating in high-fidelity aerothermal simulations of orbital deployment, capture and flight, and will allow for hands-on demonstrations of improved approaches to communication, tracking and structural configurations. “
The funds awarded by NASA will help Jeffrey Balcerski and his Cleveland-based OAI team fine-tune their “swarm” proposal and enable further development of the technology pending the choice of an actual mission to Venus in the near future on search for microbial life amid its toxic clouds.
This is all part of NASA’s support of $ 5 million in early-stage unorthodox presentations to advance new approaches to space exploration and is one of only seven studies selected by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program.
“Creativity is key to future space exploration, and advancing revolutionary ideas that may sound bizarre will prepare us for new missions and new exploration approaches in the decades to come,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. (STMD).