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​NASA Is Studying Wind-Powered Robotic Probes for Exploring Gas Giants

NASA is studying the possible physics of “windbots.”
Rachel Pick
New York, US
An artist's render of a possible windbot. Image: NASA

We use rovers to explore the terrain of Mars and the Moon, but gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn pose a difficult question: How do you explore a planet that has no solid surface?

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has floated a theoretical answer with the idea of "windbots"—robotic probes that could be powered by wind and could stay aloft in the gas planets' atmospheres.

A one-year, $100,000 study funded by NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program aims to examine this possibility, and how exactly the bot would harness energy from wind currents. The team is specifically looking at turbulence. High speed, unidirectional wind would prove difficult to keep a bot aloft, but the difference in velocity between different wind currents could provide the energy to keep the bot buoyant.

Adrian Stoica, the study's principal investigator, cites the dandelion seed as a good natural model for this kind of propulsion, saying in a NASA release that "[it's] great at staying airborne. It rotates as it falls, creating lift, which allows it to stay afloat for long time, carried by the wind."

This isn't the first time we've tried to use a semi-buoyant craft to explore a planet's atmosphere. In 1995, NASA dropped a probe with an attached parachute into Jupiter's atmosphere, but the probe lasted all of an hour before burning up.

In the release, Stoica himself stresses that this concept is still very theoretical, saying he doesn't know yet if windbots are "truly feasible." The study is purely to find out whether these crafts would in fact be possible to make. But it's an exciting idea, and one that could have practical applications on Earth as well, studying turbulent weather phenomena and examining our own climate.