Scientists have recently proposed an improvement to an existing project for a probe on a balloon to explore the atmosphere of Venus. They proposed to combine it with technology to extract oxygen from carbon dioxide.
Problems with the Venusian balloon
The project of sending a balloon to Venus, which will act as a research station, has been around for a long time. However, Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his team of researchers recently said they could make this design even more advanced, allowing the balloon to hover in the atmosphere of a neighboring planet almost indefinitely.
This is indeed a pressing problem for all Venus exploration projects. Our neighbor with its atmosphere, which in its density is close to a liquid, seems to have been created for balloons, whose lifting force is much stronger here than on Earth. However, no matter how perfect the balloon is, the gas will eventually leak out of it and the flight altitude will decrease, so eventually they will fall.
The night on Venus is much longer than on Earth and during this time the gas inside the balloon cools down a lot and this doesn’t affect its buoyancy in the best way either. In addition, all this time the solar panels of the vehicle will not be charged by the Sun, so there may be problems with the hardware as well.
Solution from Mars
Scientists propose to solve both of the above problems by combining existing balloon designs for Venus with equipment similar to what was tested on Mars during the MOXIE experiment.
The idea is that a unit on one of the Mars rovers decomposes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into carbon monoxide and atomic oxygen through a process called solid oxide electrolysis. Atomic oxygen was then converted into molecular oxygen. In general, the experiment was a complete success.
The MOXIE results are proposed to be applied to a balloon project called Exploring Venus with Electrolysis (EVE). It has already been analyzed by NASA engineers and has received a development grant from that organization.
Infinite flight duration
In the MOXIE experiment, scientists were interested in the oxygen needed for astronauts to breathe. On Venus, this option could also come in handy because there are projects for research bases on balloons. However, researchers are primarily interested in other things. Oxygen and carbon monoxide are lighter in the planet’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide, from which they can be extracted.
This means that a balloon with a carbon dioxide decomposition unit will have the ability to maintain its buoyancy forever. In addition, the scientists remind us that it is essentially a “reverse fuel cell”.
This means that after the unit has generated a supply of carbon monoxide and oxygen in the cylinder during the day, it can be used as an energy source at night. To do this, we just need to run the process in reverse, and it will start producing electrical energy. In this way, the vehicle will be able to do without the heavy batteries needed to survive the Venusian night.
According to phys.org
