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Exploration of Venus may provide important insights regarding the future of Earth and the habitability of exoplanets. As a result, there is great interest to operate a long duration mobile platform on or near the surface of Venus. This would allow for a number of investigations identified as essential to reach NASA’s objectives and goals for Venus exploration, such as identification of surface chemistry and mineralogy, exploration of chemical processes in the deep atmosphere, and measurement of seismic activity. The extreme environmental conditions at the surface of Venus make long duration missions difficult, especially for missions that include instruments like camera systems, which cannot tolerate high temperatures and pressures. Floating vehicles have been identified as a promising option for these future missions, and here a vacuum airship is proposed as a synergistic solution to shield critical instrumentation from the harsh Venusian environment for long duration operation.
A vacuum airship is a theoretically possible, yet never realized alternative to buoyant gas filled balloons. Instead of being filled with a lifting gas, like helium, which is less dense than the surrounding atmosphere, a vacuum airship makes use of an envelope that is evacuated of gas to generate buoyancy. This concept has critical advantages over gas filled balloons, especially for operation near the surface of Venus. The vacuum envelope is an ideal location to house instrumentation that requires environmental protection. This dramatically reduces power and refrigeration requirements, which have remained major obstacles for missions to the surface of Venus. A vacuum airship can also operate for longer lengths of time since a reserve supply of lifting gas is not required and vacuum can be regenerated on an as needed with an electric pump. The pump also allows for nearly inexhaustible altitude control by managing a ballast of atmospheric gas. This enables the vehicle to ascend, travel with the wind, and descend to distant locations on the surface without large energy requirements or additional equipment for mobility. Long duration, high altitude ascents can be used for solar power generation and environmentally assisted cooling.
Despite these remarkable advantages, the development of a vacuum airship has not progressed because an envelope that is both lighter than the gas it displaces and strong enough to resist collapse against the external pressure of that gas has never been constructed. Past attempts to realize such an envelope have been hampered by approaching it as a structural design problem, whereas this buoyant platform can more readily be realized by seeking cellular materials that can support a thin film envelope against external pressure. With this perspective, the challenge of designing a buoyant vehicle from an evacuated envelop is inversely proportional to the density of the fluid that the vehicle operates in. This is because the net external pressure that must be supported by the envelope and its allowable mass have a linear relationship with each other, yet the mechanical efficiency of cellular materials has a nonlinear relationship with its mass. This nonlinear relationship favors designs with higher mass, and is naturally compatible with the dense lower atmosphere of Venus.
The goal of the proposed work is to design, fabricate, and test cellular materials that enable the construction of a vacuum airship to operate near the surface of Venus. Computational optimization will be used to minimize the mass of these materials. The optimized materials will be fabricated from alumina and sealed in a thin wall titanium envelope. The envelopes will be evacuated and tested in the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig to assess their performance in the lower atmosphere of Venus.
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