Let's Visit Venus with This New NASA Rover

We’ve all been basking in Mars love for the last few days, and let’s have it. Landing the most sophisticated Mars rover ever built on the red planet earned Science some well-deserved headlines this week, and helped rekindle our somewhat lapsing national love of NASA.

But enough with Mars, now. Let’s stoke this second wind for space exploration. Let’s go to Venus. After all, just about everything we know about Venus we’ve had to glean from decades-old data collected by short-lived Soviet rovers and orbiters. So I’d say it’s about time we stake out a return to the second-closest planet to the sun.

Actually, it looks like NASA’s already on it. The crew at the agency’s Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts (RASC) division has already put together a detailed conceptual proposal outlining how we might land and operate a rover on the devastatingly harsh surface of Venus—a surface where the atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of Earth’s. Also, temperatures routinely reach 460 °C (860 °F), thanks to an uber dense atmosphere comprised almost entirely of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

So any vehicle designed to roam around on Venus must be built to withstand both incredible pressure and obliterating heat. Here’s how NASA would do it:

NASA would land a nuclear-powered rover on the surface. Once it started rolling, it’d need a way to transmit data through the muck. So, to relay the too-weak signals through the volatile atmosphere up to the orbiting satellite above, it’d relay said signal to a solar-powered plane that hovered above the rover at all times, which would then transmit it to the orbiter.

But remember, it’s like a thousand degrees on Venus; famously, hot enough to melt led, and, obviously, finicky electronics. So here’s NASA’s solution: “A Stirling engine would cool down sensitive electronics in the rover, and the device would be powered by nuclear batteries fueled with the radioactive isotope plutonium-238.” Plutonium, they say, solves all problems.

Here’s what all that looks like in diagram-form:

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This is just a concept RASC floated a year or so back, however; a thought exercise. No plans to greenlight this bit of Venusian techno-acrobatics. But word is, NASA is actually looking into building a new Venus-bound bot, in a Phase 1 project that’s evidently up for funding. The Global Post says it’s a “a robot with plans to land-sail across Venus’ surface,” which sounds promising.

Until then, we’ll just have to enjoy the images we’ve got. And look at made up ones.

• We Went to Mars Again, but the Only Surface Photos of Venus Are from 80s Soviet Rovers
• Last Night in Times Square, 100 People Watched NASA Watch a Mars Landing