pickens's Journal: Keeping Cool on Venus

In the 1970s and 80s, several probes landed on Venus and returned data from the surface but they all expired less than 2 hours after landing because of Venus' tremendous heat. It's hard to keep a rover functioning when temperatures of 450 C are hot enough to melt lead but NASA researchers have designed a refrigeration system that might be able to keep a robotic rover going for as long as 50 Earth days using a reverse Stirling engine. The rover's electronics would be packed in a ceramic-based insulator and placed it inside a metal sphere about the size of a grapefruit. Heat would then be pumped out of the sphere by compressing and then expanding a gas with a piston. When the gas expands, it absorbs heat from the electronics chamber then, as the gas is compressed and its temperature rises, the heat is allowed to dissipate in the atmosphere via a radiator. NASA has not committed to a Venus rover mission, but a 2003 National Academies of Science study recommended that high priority be given to a robot mission to investigate the Venusian surface helping to answer such questions as why Venus ended up so different from Earth and if the changes have taken place relatively recently.