High-Level Project Summary
Imagine a planet with extreme conditions. That is Venus, it has an average surface temperature of 864°F, winds that reaches 360 Km/h, 91% gravity as strong as earth gravity, an unfriendly atmposphere that has 96.5% CO2 and acid rains of sulfuric acid. Our ambitious proyect is about sending an explorer vehicle for scientific research and try to last 60 days in that hostile enviroment.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Energy solution
Firstly we designed a landing module that will also work as a power station. Inside it, there will be all the scientific equipment sheltered to send all the information to a sattelite orbiting the planet and then to earth. This power station will be aislated, and keep cooled to protect all the machines.
In the charging station, there is a thermal generator that will use the abundant CO2 which is in a supercritical state based on Bryton cicle. Part of the energy obtained, will be used to keep the turbines working and the remaining to charge the station battery . An important point is that the landing module has to be oriented to the wind so the turbines of CO2 generator work, so we took in consideration that mostly, wind in Venus tends to go for east to west. This generator will provide 10KWh.
With this energy, we can charge the batteries of the station, which will be of Li-SO2 , and 5KWh of capacity. Those batteries have a range of operative temperature between 200 C - 500 C . Also, this energy will be used for the cryocooler (that preserves the internal environment of the electronics ) and the wireless system (communication and rover charging systems)
Acid rain & temperature
As regards the corrosive acids in Venus we decided to make the power station of 450 stainless, that material would protect the equipment from acid rains and won’t get melt but the elevated temperatures would still damaging the scientific equipment, so we the decided to put a layer of aerogel inside so the heat doesn’t gets inside the shelter.
Our idea is to make the rover explore only when there isn’t acid rain. When it’s raining the rover will take shelter next to the staton, where it will be located a kind of garage. We decided not to make the rover get inside the station because it would be a more complex system and would have more probabilities to fail.
Rover mobility & recharge
The rover won’t use wheels because they would get melted, so we decided to move the rover with stainless steel paws using theo jansen system. Another option (not developed yet) would be to take advantage of the lower gravity and higher pressure of Venus and make the rover float and it wouldn’t need too much power to get propelled.
We took in consideration that the rover won’t need to explore far away from the landing site, because of that; we made the power station from the landing module. The rover is able tp explore in a radius of about 500 meters and then get back to its refuge in the station to recharge its batteries and send the collected information to the station.
To send this information and recharge the rover we took into account that Venus has a 5 times stronger energy field than Earths. So the rover can do those things wirelessly just going beside the power station.
It will have an eolic generator , especifically a savonius turbine made of 450 stainless steel (same material as the station), that will provide an average of 3.2W and a peak of 32 W to the rover so it has a better autonomy and is a second option in case of battery failure.
The autonomy of the rover depends mostly of the main battery which has a capacity of 1KWh, and made of Li-SO2 . It is the responsable of supply energy for the movement and data collect.
We decided to put an eolic generator in the rover because despite the low winds in surface, air density is 54 times stronger than earth. So that it is a good solution to recharge the rover battery while its used.
Additional Information
Expected Volume of the power station and garage: 25 m2
Expected Weight of the Rover : 800 Kg Aprox.
Required potency to -Displace 100 mts : 11 Wh
-Communication : Less than 0.5 Wh
-Weather data : 1.4 Wh
-Take and analyse sample: 330 Wh.
Space Agency Data
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/549/energy-storage-technologies-for-future-planetary-science-missions/
https://techport.nasa.gov/view/92914
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/1519/venus-resources/?page=0&per_page=40&order=created_at+desc&search=&tags=Venus&category=324
Hackathon Journey
Excelent and challenging experience!
References
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/549/energy-storage-technologies-for-future-planetary-science-missions/
https://techport.nasa.gov/view/92914
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/1519/venus-resources/?page=0&per_page=40&order=created_at+desc&search=&tags=Venus&category=324
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/automaton-rover-for-extreme-environments-aree/