3 ms·
Why not make the robot a worm, that drills beneath the ground after arriving in a impactor? All the samples you need, with only a part of the pressure and none
by WillReplyfFood 9y ago
Why not make the robot a worm, that drills beneath the ground after arriving in a impactor?
All the samples you need, with only a part of the pressure and none of the toxic atmosphere?
I know it would not make scenic photos- and take forever to get anywhere- but it would last.
- masklinn 9y agoDigging machines are quite complex and prone to failure (that is one area where humanity is basically nowhere compared to biologicals), you'd have trouble exfiltering the information, and packing the analysis ware would be even more difficult than in a surface rover.
- rtkwe 9y agoWe are fairly far behind but nature does have it a bit easier because animals are making much smaller holes through dirt and soil instead of solid rock like most human tunnels want to go through. Also they can just avoid any particularly difficult areas and move somewhere else.
- rtkwe 9y agoBurrowing through anything other than loosely packed soil by necessity creates a larger volume of tailings than the original rock which has to be constantly cleared to the surface. Packing a useful science lab into a robot small enough to burrow through loose top soil on Venus (which may or may not be very deep or even really exist since we know very little about the surface of Venus) would be difficult to impossible. Second in the case of going through hard rock via drilling, the drill teeth have a limited life span and would be extremely difficult to replace in an automated way.
- WillReplyfFood 9y agoDrilling by teeth for the first 10 meters- drilling by heat-cold fracturing with liquids for the rest?
- rtkwe 9y agoWon't that require huge amounts of energy and a lot of whatever fluid you're using? Also that still leaves dealing with the tailings.