We Finally Have a Computer That Can Survive the Surface of Venus (arstechnica.com) 156
Planet Venus is one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. The surface temperature there is 470C (878F). This has been one of the key challenges that has prevented us from deeply exploring Venus. Normal chips can only function until around 250C, but it appears, we will soon have a computer that can withstand Venus' weather. From a report on ArsTechnica: Now, researchers out of NASA's Glenn Research Centre appear to have cracked the other big problem with high-temperature integrated circuits: they've crafted interconnects -- the tiny wires that connect transistors and other integrated components together -- that can also survive the extreme conditions on Venus. The NASA Glenn researchers combined the new interconnects with some SiC transistors to create a ceramic-packaged chip. The chip was then placed into the GEER -- the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig, a machine that can maintain Venus-like temperature and pressure for hundreds of hours at a time. The chip, a simple 3-stage oscillator, kept functioning at a steady 1.26MHz for 521 hours (21.7) days before the GEER had to be shut down.
Confused? (Score:5, Informative)
"We Finally Have a Computer..."
"...we may soon have a computer..."
From the don't-count-your-chickens dept. ?
Re: (Score:3)
We will soon have a computer that can survive on Venus. We do currently, and we're not planning on destroying it and forgetting how we made it, thus we will soon also have a computer that can survive on venus.
Unfortunately, it still will not be sufficient to proofread submissions.
More seriously, the Russians had a viable competing technology 50 years ago [wikipedia.org]. I believe the technology codename was something like "put it in something th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Based on average refrigerator lifespan, a nuclear powered heat pump and insulation would work for years, thereby allowing a rover to operate on Venus.
It's almost as if you've never heard of the unit of power called "Watts". It allows us to calculate how big of a power supply we'll need for a task.
Re:Confused? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your post is largely correct, with the caveat that with proper insulation, the rate of heat flow to the exterior can be kept surprisingly small. But RTGs are indeed hindered by the external heat that they have to reject waste heat to. Solar power surprisingly actually works on the surface, but at terrible efficiency (if I recall correctly, something like 2.7W/m). And wind indeed has been proposed as a power source. Windspeeds are low, rarely more than a meter per second or so, but due to the high density it's not actually a bad power source. There's even been one wind-propelled rover proposal under investigation (Zephyr).
Indeed, the whole point of long-term Venus landers is indeed not large amounts of power, but basically surface "weather stations" or "seismic stations" that just sit there using a few watts here and there and transmitting results up to a higher power relay.
On the other hand, getting things to the surface of Venus is surprisingly easy. Landis once worked out that you could launch a hollow titanium sphere to Venus, have it aerocapture, and land safety on the surface, without any sort of aeroshell, ablation system or parachute whatsoever. Venus has a big "fluffy" atmosphere for slowing things down, and by the bottom the density is so great that terminal velocity can be survivable for well-built probes.
Re: (Score:3)
Venus is absolutely not uninhabitable [nasa.gov].
And as for science, knowing whether Venus is the fate of Earth, or how to determine whether an exoplanet would be a second Earth or a second Venus, is a lot bigger of a question than anything Mars can answer. Venus is not only our closest neighbor and almost the same size, but once had oceans like Earth. And her atmosphere appears locked into this vicious cycle, where she's hot because her CO2 isn't stored as carbonates, but she can't form carbonates because she's too
Re: (Score:1)
More like don't-count-on-your-editors dept.
Re: (Score:2)
"We Finally Have a Computer..."
"...we may soon have a computer..."
We only have a oscilator for now
from the it-will-probably-take-a-decade-before-a-proper-computer department
FTFY
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
... and what they have is not a computer, but a simple, slow oscillator. Alternate facts or fake news? Who knows...
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
1) The linked article has pictures of the actual prototype
2) What you linked is made of polystyrene which melts at 100C
3) Keep your day job, because you will never make it as a comedian
Re: (Score:1)
1) The linked article has pictures of the actual prototype
of an extremely simple chip, not a computer.
2) What you linked is made of polystyrene which melts at 100C
From the same department as the chocolate teapot then.
3) Keep your day job, because you will never make it as a comedian
You, on the other hand, are just a barrel of laughs.
900 is 90 times hotter than Earth? (Score:1)
Re:900 is 90 times hotter than Earth? (Score:5, Informative)
Except 0 is arbitrary in Farenheit... Average Earth temp is 287 kelvin, average Venus temp is 735 kelvin. So really it's only like 2.5x hotter than Earth by any objective measurement. Otherwise you could say a 1 degree F day is infinitely hotter than a 0 degree F day and mathematically on an arbitrary scale, that would be correct.
Re: (Score:1)
Why not Rankine? 0 R is 0 K and it has the more granular step size of Fahrenheit, but without the arbitrary zero-point.
Re:900 is 90 times hotter than Earth? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
It used to be the big thing in (American) thermodynamics and rocket science (combustion efficiency calculations).
Now, not so much.
Re: (Score:3)
One of the (smaller) reasons I dropped out of the ChemE degree I was pursuing was because one day in one of my classes, there was a number written on the board. We asked the prof what it was, and his reply was "That's the ideal gas constant, R. I wrote it there because we'll be using it today". We looked at him funny and said "No it's not. We use R all the time, and it's not that". "Well.... yes it is, but this is the value of R in the units atmosphere gallons per lbmol rankine."
While I appreciate the
Re: (Score:2)
waaait.
There's exactly 100K between water boiling and melting point; Kelvin increments the same as Celsius.
So, 100 Joules will bring 1cm^3 of water from freezing to boiling temperature...
Joule is kg*m^2/s^2 - 1000cm^3 of water is 1kg. That's the origin of meter unit (redefined later).
Second is 1/86400 of Earth's synodic day.
But kilogram definition is arbitrary, "this here cylinder of iridium alloy".
How the hell do we arrive at 100 times [mass of a certain iridium cylinder] times [side of cube of water the m
Re: (Score:2)
replying to self. We don't. You confused Joules with calories.
Re: (Score:1)
Pressure is about 90 times that of Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
The statement was "the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470C (878F) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water".
It's the atmospheric pressure, not the temperature, that is about 90 times that of Earth
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe it was in the original article, and now the "90 times" has been removed from the summary... That's Slashdot for you. Shitty editing.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not arbitrary. It's just based on a frigorific mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:900 is 90 times hotter than Earth? (Score:4, Interesting)
Except 0 is arbitrary in Farenheit... Average Earth temp is 287 kelvin, average Venus temp is 735 kelvin. So really it's only like 2.5x hotter than Earth by any objective measurement.
Only if you assume a linear scale. Given how much of the interesting stuff happens near 0 K, and how little difference there is between 10,000,000 K and 100,000,000 K, I would think it would be better if we started treating temperature as a logarithmic scale.
Or, put another way, the 448 degree difference between 287 K and 735 K is obviously a lot less significant than the 287 degree difference between 0 K and 287 K.
Re: (Score:2)
I do wonder why the scientific temperature scale isn't logarithmic...
Re: (Score:2)
I do wonder why the scientific temperature scale isn't logarithmic...
Because that would make the really fundamental things like the ideal gas law unnecessarily complicated.
Re: (Score:2)
I just wish we used units that rendered the gas constant unnecessary. I should probably memorize it to more digits than "8,31" so that I don't have to keep looking it up :
For it to be obvious (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
For it to be obvious, you first have to know the significance. So what makes it significant to you?
Atoms moving vs not moving is more significant than atoms moving vs moving slightly faster.
Or, to put it another way, the difference between a plane doing 287 km/h and one doing 735 km/h is obviously less than the difference between a plane doing 287 km/h and a hill.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
lolwut, rushing to first post so you didn't read it properly?
the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470ÂC (878ÂF) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Always quote the dumb summaries so you don't look a maroon when they fix 'em.
Re: (Score:2)
Um... temperature doesn't work that way (Score:3)
Maybe if we were talking about the Kelvin scale, but even then, 90x is a pretty meaningless way of comparing temperatures. Much better to maybe mention that at 470C:
Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/period... [lenntech.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Oops... even with reviewing I somehow missed the connecting words: "Much better to maybe mention that at 470C these elements melt:"
Re: (Score:2)
Room temperature is 272K.
At least you don't need a fridge...nor a freezer, for that matter.
Re: (Score:2)
I just meant that using multiples to compare _any_ temperatures is meaningless in C. If you want to do temperature multiples, K is better, and, of course, you're correct that Venus isn't 90x Earth in K either.
Not just this (Score:4, Insightful)
First, a computer is a whole lot more than just a chip. How about boards, wire runs, resisters, transistors? But the atmosphere of Venus contains massive amounts of toxic gasses. If we have a computer chip that operates at high temperatures, what is it made of and how quickly does it break down inside the atmosphere of Venus?
So not only don't we have a computer that works on Venus, we don't have chips that work on Venus. TFA says that they may have a chip that operates at high temperatures but since it has not quite been invented yet we can't test the viability of said chip in Venus' atmosphere. Not only am I cynical, but I'm really tired of the chronic hyperbole in seemingly everything.
Re: (Score:2)
First, a computer is a whole lot more than just a chip.
No, it really isn't, see SoCs. I doubt the external is a problem, the semiconductor interconnnects are.
But the atmosphere of Venus contains massive amounts of toxic gasses. If we have a computer chip that operates at high temperatures, what is it made of and how quickly does it break down inside the atmosphere of Venus?
Chips are never, not even on earth, exposed to the atmosphere. See also TFS, look out for where it says "ceramic-packaged".
So not only don't we have a computer that works on Venus, we don't have chips that work on Venus. TFA says that they may have a chip that operates at high temperatures but since it has not quite been invented yet we can't test the viability of said chip in Venus' atmosphere.
Where does TFA say that? What about the part where they allegedly tested an actual chip for a few weeks in venus-like temperatures and pressures?
Re:Not just this (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you are technically correct in the first part, but a computer is much more than a chip and a power supply. Cool in my opinion that they can get them to run on the Moon and Mars, but Venus adds quite a few new challenges other than heat and pressure. Namely, the corrosive gasses under the same heat and pressure.
Your second part is correct for computers that are space worthy, but not true for computers on earth. Most chips in Earth's atmosphere are exposed to the atmosphere. Legs of a chip are not coming out of an environment proof seal, and they are not air proof. You are half right, and my generalization for a space worthy computer was wrong.
Your last part is answered with: "The chip, a simple 3-stage oscillator, kept functioning at a steady 1.26MHz for 521 hours (21.7) days before the GEER had to be shut down." So they don't have a functional computer, but they have interconnects that could handle heat from a very slow oscillator. A computer is a whole lot more components, with a whole lot more IO, generating a whole heat.
Don't misunderstand, I think the goal is noble. I'd love to have some atmospheric data coming from Venus, information on surface, weather, etc.. like we do on Mars. I just disagree with using Hyperbole to sell the concept.
Chips have legs? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Your standard Venera-style probe consists of the following layers:
1) Outer spherical steel shell
2) Insulation
3) Phase-change material as a constant-temperature heat heat sink
4) Everything that you don't want hot, compressed, or exposed to corrosive chemicals.
The only thing that's hard to keep from happening is the "hot" part, because eventually your phase change material reaches its limits and the temperature starts to rise.
Re: (Score:2)
I assume you mean "more data". We've already had the Venera probes, the Pioneer probes, and the Vega probes (including PTFE superpressure balloons - the only airborne vehicles on another world to date).
Those did not provide, nor could they provide, any surface data. Stop selectively reading posts and we could have a better conversation.
Re: (Score:2)
You've never bonded a die, have you?
No, I haven't.
So even if there are bare dies (which aren't really bare after the 'passivation layer'), that's not the usual case. If for some reason this is required at 10GHz (which I doubt), then fair enough. The chip TFA talks about oscillates four orders of magnitude slower, and something makes me believe they won't go for bare-die.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not as simple as that. Near the surface, the atmosphere is CO2 (96.5%) and N2 (3.5%) with a trace of SO2. Interestingly, that''s nearly the same absolute amount of N2 as in the Earth's atmosphere. It would kill you even if you reduced the temperature to something survivable, but it wouldn't either dissolve you or kill people trying to autopsy your corpse. Higher up are the cloud layers which we can see, which contain water droplets, a
Re: (Score:2)
The current version of TFA says that the surface pressure of Venus is about 90x that of Earth, which is correct. You must have gotten an earlier, incorrect version.
Good to see equal sex computing... (Score:4, Funny)
Since supposedly men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, it's good to see they've finally created a computer that can survive women.
/ sorry, I'm not really sexist
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I remember as a kid watching reruns of Green Acres on Nick at Night. They had an ad - which my father had to explain to me - which showed the lead actress, with the voiceover: "This is Eva Gabor. Not Zsa Zsa. Eva won't hurt you."
Hi, I was a scientist at Buzzfeed (Score:5, Informative)
How, as an editor for a tech site, do you hire someone who can't even recognize a total goof in the summary intro? The PRESSURE at the surface of Venus is 90x that of earth.
I'd understand if you had one or two editors posting hundreds of stories a day - one might slip through. But you're barely posting one story an hour to the front page. How do you fuck that up?
Re: (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure it's mostly automated. I seriously doubt that editors are sitting around the table, manually skimming thousands of submissions.
More likely, they're sitting at Starbucks talking about how their LGBT-BBQ-EIEIO rights are being trampled on... their phone goes BEEP BEEP after picking an article with the requisite number of bullshit bingo buzzwords, they click a button on some app, and the next Musk / AI / socialism story gets posted. No actual reading involved.
Re: (Score:2)
They fired all the editors. There's literally one editor now.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:My 8th grade teacher Mr. Burgess... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, 'except, you're not surviving Venereal weather?'
I seem to recall that we only use 'Venusian' because 'Venereal' was already taken by the medical community.....
Hopefully it does math better there... (Score:3)
I don't even want to know...
So Google says the average temperature on Earth is 16 C, or 289.3 K. 90x that is about 26,000 K.
The article (yes, I looked at it) actually says the pressure is about 90 times that on Earth.
Yawn (Score:2)
call me when you build a computer that can survive the interior of Uranus
Re: (Score:3)
Uranus's core density is around 9 g/cm3, with a pressure in the centre of 8 million bars (800 GPa) and a temperature of about 5000 K.
(And yes, I get the obvious joke, lest ye "whoosh" me...)
Re: (Score:2)
Hah. Because it sounds like the word for butthole!
Re: (Score:3)
My problem with the name Uranus isn't that stupid, overused joke - it's the fact that it's the only planet named after a Greek, not Roman, god. It should have been Caelus.
And Samsung will supply the batteries (Score:5, Funny)
Is it really that hard? (Score:3)
Can't they just encase the thing in some kind of packaging with its own cooling system? Or is it a case of whatever it takes to keep it running on Venus is too fucking big to send to Venus?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Is it really that hard? (Score:4, Informative)
Your refrigerator's heat pump is a phase-change coolant system (i.e. enormous coefficient of performance), working against a small temperature difference (perhaps 20K), with a small heat flux (A few watts of heat seeping in). These performance specs are pretty much trivial to meet, which is why modern fridges are pretty much sealed, lifetime-performance units. The reason why is that the amount of work a heat pump has to do is proportional to the SQUARE of the temperature difference: The amount of heat leaking in, and the amount of work needed to expel a given amount of heat, are both proportional to delta-T. Keeping a well-insulated box 20*c cooler than its surroundings is easy. Really easy.
INITIATE SIMPLE BACK-OF-ENVELOPE ENGINEERING PLAUSIBILITY ANALYSIS
Supposing we want to keep the inside of a Venus probe down to a mere... 100*C? Now we have a 330 degree temperature difference. That's 17x the temperature difference in your coldbox: The venus probe's fridge will have 275 TIMES the work to do per unit area & insulation. Shit.
Suppose the probe is a silvered ball 2 meters in diameter. Let's plug in... 30mW/m-K and give it a 250mm thick aerogel insulator all around its inside surface. That's roughly 500W of heat leaking in from a 430C ambient, and we haven't put ANYTHING through the aerogel (like the supports for the probe's internal goodies...) which will send that through the roof.
The radiator itself is a fairly simple matter - only 800cm^2 of outward facing blackbody surface, heated to 500C, will dump our waste heat into a 430C ambient. I don't know nearly enough about refrigeration technology to say what a mechanical refrigerator capable of pushing 500W of heat up a 400* difference will look like... My first google search brought up a unit capable of dumping 500W in the vicinity of room temp across probably a 20C difference (HRU-1000) which fills .012 cubic meters. Naively scale it to do 270x the work, that's eating 3.2 cubic meters of probe volume in order to keep the inside down to a blazing 100*C. Our 2-meter-diameter probe, with 250mm of aerogel shell, only has 1.7 cubic meters of internal volume.
We're out of space twice over and we have no atomic power supply, no scientific instruments, no computer, no radio to talk back to earth... Also I don't think the world's remaining Pu-238 stockpile can build a themionic generator capable of powering that fridge, but that's a "minor technical detail."
Heat leakage scales as area, volume scales as volume, so the situation gets better for bigger probes. Fat chance of that, seeing as the last Saturn V is sitting on its side in pieces... There's no way a usefully chilled Venus surface probe happens in the realistic near future.
Re: (Score:2)
Naively scale it to do 270x the work, that's eating 3.2 cubic meters of probe volume in order to keep the inside down to a blazing 100*C. Our 2-meter-diameter probe, with 250mm of aerogel shell, only has 1.7 cubic meters of internal volume.
Uh, the radiator is bolted to the outside of the sphere. The components on the inside are considerably smaller than the radiator on the outside. Think CPU water cooling rig. The water block is quite small in volume compared to the radiator.
You neglected the really useful calculation: the Carnot efficiency. Let's see if there's a little more room on the back of the envelope.
Carnot efficiency is given by: (TH-TC)/TH*100% so for Venus at 470K and room temperature at 298K, we get an efficiency of 36%. So i
Re: (Score:2)
Can't they just encase the thing in some kind of packaging with its own cooling system? Or is it a case of whatever it takes to keep it running on Venus is too fucking big to send to Venus?
Well in order to make some bits of the system cooler than the environment it has to make other bits hotter so it'll radiate away, which is done by forcing the refrigerant to go through a phase change. There aren't exactly many refrigerants that'll be useful at those temperatures and you'd also need a compressor that can operate at 500+ C and the whole process will be very power intensive. It'll be nothing like the refrigerator you have, it'll be more like tryng to keep room temperature inside an egg submerg
Re: (Score:2)
Difficult because the hot side temperature needs to be very hot, but not crazy. The ability to use standard silicon would vastly reduce the circuit size, and maybe power consumption.
If pumps and motors can work at Venusian temperatures, then a cooler would not be all that difficult. Motors are probably needed for the lander to do useful stuff anyway.
A TEC cooler would be better, but I'm not aware of any thermometric materials that can work at that temperature. There might be a trick using a ferromagnetic m
Mainstream computing applications (Score:1)
But can it survive Fukushima? (Score:2)
I just read that the clean-up robots at Fukushima can't withstand the radiation of the site. I wonder if this sort of improvement could be adapted to improve the clean-up hardware. Is temperature and radiation it the same kind of 'heat'?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not quite (Score:4, Informative)
To be clear, we don't have a computer that can survive on Venus, or anything near that. What the research team made is a ring-buffer, which is a collection of maybe 20-30 transistors arranged in a big circle (with one inverter).
That's a very far cry from even an Intel 8080, which is approximately 4500 [wikipedia.org] transistors. And that's without any RAM, Flash, or anything else. This is an impressive milestone to be sure, but it's nowhere near an Arduino (let alone a full computer).
It's a FRAUD to make money for greedy scientists! (Score:1)
With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that the greenhouse gas heated Venus is the second greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?
This is a conspiracy to waste money inventing expensive devices to explore a hot planet when it is in fact a freezing cold planet as evidenced by the huge amount of reflected solar radiation it can not be as hot as these "so called scientists" claim it is.
Just go to Fox News and find out for yourself!
whoosh! guess that went over heads (Score:2)
Venus and planetary science have a historical role in global warming. I thought I'd quote some big "skeptics" and swap out earth for venus to make a satirical point. You need not know the history to get the point.
Moderators must have taken it seriously... guess I have to make it funny or something.
Re: (Score:2)
According to wikipedia, A computer is a device that can be instructed to carry out an arbitrary set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically.
. By that definition, an abacus doesn't qualify.
More traditionally,
Yo mama
is a computer.
Some day ... (Score:2)
Not the only problem. (Score:2)
NASA engineer: "Our grand heat-tolerant computer is reporting back the latest findings from the probe ... it confirms that all the scientific instruments are fried and not returning data."
Maybe they can build a PDP-11 this way (Score:2)
Dinosaurs (Score:2)
Sure, they'll survive the weather, but won't they just get eaten by dinosaurs? [smithsonianmag.com] :)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, yes - the 20th century was filled with no shortage of disappointments concerning our planetary neighbors.
The unfortunate thing about Venus is, if its atmosphere had stopped at around the height that is today 54-55km, nobody would be talking about Mars as a human habitation destination. Indeed, one proposal for terraforming Venus is to build a whole new surface at that height and just call it good enough ;)
Not the first. (Score:4, Funny)
470C? Oh please, my AMD chip runs at least twice as hot as that. ;)
Soviet Pyrotechnics (Score:2)
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Reading the article about the Soviet experience with Venus there seemed a pretty heavy reliance on "Pyrotechnic charges"...
Soviet Project Manager: "Vere having a problem with abc operating under extreme pressure..."
Soviet Engineer "Have we blown it up yet? Ve could try blowing it up first..."
Also kinda surprised that things like pyrotechnic charges wouldn't accidentally go off under heat/pressure/corrosion.
"The surface temperature there is 470C (878F)" (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Fluidics might be difficult. It's slow, and if you want liquid state you'd want to choose something liquid both at the conditions in space near Venus and at near 500 C on the surface. Vapor state is the other possibility - how much pneumatic logic is used, practically speaking?
My first thought was, as you suggested, vacuum tube technology. Ceramics, tungsten and most other common metals are solid at 500 C, although aluminum is weak that high. With the proper material choice, a coated cathode wouldn't even n