NewScientist (16 April 2016) reports on the more outré missions NASA has given some small funding. Here’s my favorite.
A clockwork Venus rover. No lander has survived on Venus’s hostile surface for much more than 2 hours. The solution might be a fully mechanical one, with no electronics. To send messages back home, it could record data on a phonograph, then loft it on a balloon to rendezvous with a spacecraft overhead.
I’m having some difficulties imagining a balloon getting high enough, even if the spacecraft swooped down to snag it. But how about a gig like that used by Virgin Galactic, where a plane takes the spacecraft to about 50,000 ft and releases it, and then the spacecraft activates its main engine for the remainder of the ride? On Venus, the balloon lofts the payload to a respectable height, and then a rocket boosts it up where an orbiter could retrieve it up for either return to Earth (hard) or reading & relay. But how to synchronize the spacecraft with the balloon and launch? And could this be done sans electronics?
From one of the Soviet Venera spacecraft, courtesy Space Answers.
