Join HSNY on Monday, December 9, 2019 for a lecture on Exploring the Surface of Venus with a Clockwork Rover, by Evan Hilgemann, Mechanical Engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California.
The surface of Venus is one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. It features sulfuric acid clouds, temperatures over 450°C, and a pressure 92 times that of the surface of Earth. Only a handful of probes have successfully reached the surface, and even then only survived for about two hours before their electronics failed in the hostile environment. At the December 9, 2019, meeting of the Horological Society of New York, Evan Hilgemann will discuss a potential solution for exploring Venus. The solution comes from 16th century automatons, which were mechanical devices capable of performing a series of complex actions to achieve a specific result. The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE), would replace vulnerable electronic systems with a mechanical design, including a mechanical timekeeper. By utilizing high temperature alloys the rover would survive for months, allowing it to collect and return valuable long-term science data from the surface of Venus. This science data would be critical for informing and improving models of dynamic planetary systems. To implement AREE, “steampunk” science fiction meets spacecraft technology in a unique rover that must be robust and able to operate during its entire mission without human intervention.
