Flight Demonstration and Model Validation of a Prototype Variable-Altitude Venus Aerobot

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.06643
• Publication Date: 2024-11-10
• Authors: Jacob Izraelevitz; Siddharth Krishna...; Ashish Goel; Caleb Turner; Carolina Aiazzi; Michael Pauken; Kevin Carlson; Gerald Walsh; Carl Leake; Carlos Quintana; Christopher Lim; Abhi Jain; Leonard I. Dorsky; K. H. Baines; J. A. Cutts; P. K. Byrne; Tim Lachenmeier; Jeffery L. Hall
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Robotics; Robotics (cs.RO)

This paper details a significant milestone towards maturing buoyant aerial robotic platform, or aerobot, for flight in the Venus clouds. We describe two flights of our subscale altitude-controlled fabricated from materials necessary to survive conditions. During these over Nevada Black Rock desert, prototype flew at identical atmospheric densities as 54 55 km cloud layer altitudes on Venus. further first-principle aerobot dynamics model which we validate against data and subsequently employ predict performance future aerobots The discussed this is under JPL development an in-situ mission flying multiple circumnavigations Venus, sampling chemical physical properties planet's atmosphere also remotely sensing surface properties.