NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory has unveiled a clockwork rover designed to survive on Venus 鈥搒omething no previous probe has managed for more than a couple of hours.
Venus is a hellish environment: its atmosphere is 90 times denser than Earth鈥檚 and gets up to 460掳C, hot enough to melt lead and fry the electronics on Martian rovers. To cope, the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) takes inspiration from the mechanical computers of the past.
Wind turbines and sunlight would generate power to push its tank-like treads along the ground and compute its path. AREE would communicate using Morse code, transmitted to relay balloons in the atmosphere.
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It is still early days, but the hope is that the rover will wander Venus鈥檚 surface and maybe even drill into its rocky crust.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淪teampunk rover鈥�
