NASA seeks citizen inventors to design a hardy Venus rover

Even for a robot, moving around on Venus is no mean feat. The surface temperature there is about 450 °C. Atmospheric pressure is a crushing 92 times that of Earth, equivalent to conditions at 3300 meters of ocean depth. Only a handful of spacecraft have reached the surface, most recently the Soviet Vega 2 in 1985. No lander has functioned for more than two hours.

Despite that Hadean environment, NASA researchers hope to someday put a rover on Venus that will spend weeks or months exploring Earth’s twin . But the silicon electronics used in the cameras and onboard vision recognition and guidance systems that help Martian rovers avoid obstacles won’t work on Venus. Even military-grade electronics fail at about 125 °C. And although gallium nitride and silicon carbide electronics might survive (see Physics Today, March 2017, page 19 ), they consume a lot of energy, especially at high temperature, and the feature size achievable with those substrates is low, just a few hundred transistors on a chip, says Jonathan Sauder, a principal investigator on the concept at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). That would provide about the computing capacity of a solar-powered handheld calculator.

NASA engineers have a concept for a vehicle called the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE), a purely mechanical robot that would be capable of performing sequences of operations and instructions. Now they’re asking for some help developing it. Last month JPL opened a $30 000 contest on the crowdsourcing platform HeroX in search of descriptions, blueprints, or prototypes of an obstacle avoidance sensor that does not rely on electronics. It’s the latest move by NASA to exploit the ingenuity of amateur inventors to supplement the agency’s own expertise.

Built from high-temperature metals such as titanium, stainless steel, and nickel–chromium superalloys, AREE would collect longitudinal data including seismic events, wind speed, and temperature. The rover would store energy from its wind turbine in a clock spring. Its legs or wheels would be guided by a mechanical computer and logic system programmed to carry out the mission. Onboard data would likely be stored by setting pins to a specific height, each pin encoding a hexadecimal character.

Sauder emphasizes that NASA doesn’t expect contest entrants to produce models out of the high-temperature alloys that ultimately will be necessary. The winner of the contest will receive $15 000. Second place receives $10 000, and third, $5000. Submissions are due by 29 May.

In the NASA nomenclature, AREE is a concept, not yet a mission. The current timetable calls for a potential upgrade to occur around 2040. But Sauder hopes to make that happen sooner. “In the fastest case, it’s still a decade out before it’s funded as a full mission. It would then be about three to six years before launch and another year of cruise” before reaching Venus, he says.

HeroX is one of 10 platforms that have been used by NASA’s Tournament Lab, which has sponsored 419 prizes in nine years. In 2017 HeroX hosted the popular “space poop challenge,” which attracted 5000 submissions over 60 days. That $30 000 award was split among three winners for their separate solutions for dealing with human waste inside a spacesuit for up to six days.

Christian Cotichini, who cofounded HeroX with Peter Diamandis of X Prize fame, says with all the hype over artificial intelligence, it’s easy to forget that among the hundreds of millions of people connected to the internet are some “who are highly educated, often underemployed and underengaged in their jobs, and would jump at the opportunity to collaborate and problem-solve with organizations like NASA.” HeroX provides the tool kit to set up the contest, Cotichini says, but the winners will be determined by a panel of 20 JPL engineers.

Ryon Stewart, a challenge coordinator at NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, says the agency has deemed 94% of the Tournament Lab contests successful. Forty percent of those successes completely solved the problem; the rest either significantly or incrementally advanced a solution. About 80% of the successes resulted in lower costs than what NASA managers said they would have had to pay the agency’s own engineers or contractors to tackle the problems.

Among other Tournament Lab contests was a 2017 search cosponsored by NASA and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for ideas for small aerosol sensors that could be used both in spaceflight and in outdoor locations to measure human exposure to airborne particulates. That same year, a NASA contest helped the US Department of Homeland Security develop an algorithm that would speed airport security checks by reducing the false alarm rate of scanning machines. That prize was $1.5 million. Stewart says the new software should soon be installed in airports.

The Tournament Lab is one of a half-dozen technology crowdsourcing mechanisms used by NASA. Others include International Space Apps, an annual two-day international hackathon. Sauder posed one of the 18 Space Apps challenges for the 2019 event: finding methods to store data mechanically. That challenge produced two teams of finalists, from Spain and Ukraine, but no winner.

To be sure, there are further challenges to be tackled before a rover wanders the Venusian surface, not least how to transmit the data it gathers. Potential communication approaches include using a simple electronic transponder that works at high temperatures or inscribing phonograph-type records that would be launched by balloon to a high-altitude drone capable of deciphering and transmitting the data to Earth.