Re: Mars rover sticker shock



Korben Dallas wrote:

sending a rover to venus would be as bad as sending a rover to the moon: it
would draw obvious analogies and attract too much attention to what these mars
rover projects really are, i.e. just a "we can do it too" projects to prove the
rest of the world that nasa can finally repeat the soviet successes with their
venus landers (which btw lasted a lot longer than they were designed to last
and had video feed)

They took panoramic still pictures of the surface, they did not have video feed. As for how long they survived on the surface, the record seems to be 127 minutes for Venera-13.
Our Mars rover have been working for over 4 years now.

and their moon rovers (again, with video feed).

If you've ever seen the quality of the television video feed from the Lunokhods, it's nothing to get excited about.
The good quality pictures of the surface were taken by still cameras with the rovers at rest, and they weren't at all that great of resolution either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Luna17_1.jpg
The total operational lifetime of the longest-lived of the two Lunokhods was 322 days.

nasa did not
want to be seen as an entity spending huge amounts of taxpayers money just for
ego-fixing purposes. and of course the conditions on mars are a walk in the park
compared to the conditions on venus.

The cold at night was quite challenging, and it was never expected that the Mars rovers would last this long.
Still, Venus makes either the Moon or Mars look like a walk in the park as far as designing a rover goes, due to the heat and pressure.
Something like a balloon that would rise off of and descend to the surface as the wind moved it would make more sense.
The thick Venusian atmosphere would make that a workable proposition, sort of a atmospheric version of a bathyscaphe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe
Lifetime though is bound to be pretty limited in that heat...you'd need to seal all the electronics in something like a vacuum bottle, and even then you'd need some sort of cryogenic fluid cooling system to keep things cool over any long period of time.

Pat
.

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