
Landing on Venus: The toughest spaceship we’ve ever built - curtis
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160705-the-toughest-spaceship-weve-ever-built
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curtis
One interesting proposal: Using a Stirling engine powered by burning lithium
fuel and using carbon dioxide from the Venusian atmosphere as the oxidizer.
And conveniently, lithium is liquid at Venusian surface temperatures.

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sevenless
Solar panels can work when it's overcast. Of course they may not work in that
kind of heat. Seems 10% of falling sunlight reaches the surface of Venus, or
20% of Earth's, which is 5 times more than the Juno probe gets.

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curtis
Solar is even more practical if your lander can bounce back and forth between
the surface and high altitude. Instead of a rover type design, you could make
a lander that's kind of halfway between a submersible and an airship. The
lander would descend to the surface, hang out for a while doing sciency stuff,
then when the coolant starts to run low it would ascend to high altitude, use
solar panels to rebuild the coolant supply (you could just use nitrogen from
the atmoshpere), and then it could descend again.

