NASA Plan To Make A Floating City Above Venus Clouds
Source : edition.cnn
Imagine a dirigible (free floating like ballon) city floating 30 miles above the hot surface of Venus, a team of astronauts studying one of the most inhospitable planet of our solar system.
A team of NASA scientists recently announced a project HAVOC (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) the project is all about how a 30 days manned mission on venus go down and this project is unpredictable by the NASA scientists because much of the necessary technology used in this project doesn’t exist yet.
Eventually, according to this mission permanent human presence on other planet could be possible.
Creating HAVOC
HAVOC engineers and scientists at the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, have been working on an early study on how robots and humans could make this mission a reality with feasibility analysis.
Source : astronomy
Deep Heat
As you all know venus known as the morning star, and named after the goddess of beauty & love because it shine the brightest of the five planets known to ancient astronomers, Venus is a blazing hot, sulphurous, extremely unpleasant place whose surface has more volcanoes than any other planet in the solar system.
With mean temperature of 462 degrees Celsius and atmospheric pressure 92 times greater than planet Earth and a sulphuric acid cloud layer. Venus surface is hot enough to melt lead and its atmospheric pressure is equivalent of diving a mile underwater.
At an altitude of 50km, scientists say the conditions are as near to Earth as you will find anywhere in the solar system.
The gravity at this altitude a bit lower than that of Earth, its atmospheric pressure is somewhat similar and the aerospace provides enough protection from solar radiation.
Closer to Earth
Advantage of being much closer to Earth than Mars.
Distance to Venus from Earth – 38 million kilometres
Distance to Mars from Earth – 54.6 million kilometres
NASA said “The kind of multi-decade mission that we believe could succeed would be an evolutionary program for the exploration of Venus, with focus on the mission architecture and vehicle concept for a 30-day crewed mission into Venus atmosphere”.
The concept of sending a spacecraft into the atmosphere without landing it logically is very difficult task.
The HAVOC model involve the astronauts placing inside an ‘Aeroshell’ that would enter the atmosphere at 4,500 miles per hour.
Jones said the key technical challenges for the mission include performing the “aerocapture” maneuvers at Venus and Earth (the process of entering the orbit of both planets), inserting and inflating the airships, and protecting the solar panels and structure from the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere.
CHRISTOPHER A. JONES
“Eventually, a short duration human mission would allow us to gain experience having humans live at another world, with the hope that it would someday be possible to live in the atmosphere permanently” Jones said.
