Space

Robots that were Sacrificed in Space

November 3, 2020November 8, 2020 by Manisha Mani

Several robots are sent to space to explore it without having to worry so much about their safety. Of course, they wish carefully built robots to last long. They need them to stick around long enough in order to examine and send us information about their destinations. And the advantage that they see here is that even if a robotic mission fails, the humans involved with the mission stay safe.

Sending a robot to space is also much cheaper as compared to sending a human. A robot doesn’t feel the need to eat or sleep or go to the bathroom. They can survive in space for as many years as possible and can be left out there without requiring a return trip!

Also, robots can do lots of things that humans can’t as they can withstand harsh conditions, such as extreme temperatures or high levels of radiation. Robots can also be built to do things that would be too risky or impossible for astronauts to do. Thus, to unlock the mysteries of the universe, some sacrifices will have to be made.

So far, the greatest, the noblest deaths in the name of science have been those of robotic explorers. Let’s take a moment to remember them.

During the Human, space travels it is tough to keep people stay alive and to bring them safely home. They have few qualms about sending robots on one-way suicide missions to the stars. It’s not that they have no intention of bringing them home. They have sent many robotic probes to environments. Though they knew they would destroy them. And in some cases, the very destruction of these probes is a part of the scientific experiments. Or in the case of the recent destruction of Cassini, to save the solar system for future experiments.

Today, we are going to memorialize the robots that have given their lives in the name of exploration.

Robots on Venus

Venus, with its dead atmosphere, is the most ravenous consumer of earth-made landers and the Soviet Union feared it the most.

From 1966 to 1982, nearly 12 probes from the Soviet Venera Program they’re devoured by the atmosphere of Venus. After a few probes they’re destroyed on the descent, Venera 7 became the first-ever man-made probe to land on another world in 1970. It fought against the blistering 445-degree Celsius heat and crushing 19-atmosphere pressure for 23 minutes before going quiet. This was just long enough to make the first-ever transmission from the surface of another planet. Accurate temperature and pressure readings of the atmosphere that killed them. And these measurements would have been impossible outside the thick atmosphere Venus. Seven more generations of Venera probe landed on Venus, sending us the first images from the surface of another world. Venus devoured all of them, with Venera 13 surviving the longest at 127 minutes.

Robots on Mars

Mars is also a favorite destination for doomed robots. In some ways, it’s harder to land things on Mars due to it has an extremely thin atmosphere, which makes the parachute-assisted soft landing very difficult. There is a rich history of robot death on Mars, from the ill-fated series of Soviet Mars Landers to the notorious Mars climate orbiter, which accidentally entered the Martian atmosphere due to a unit conversion error. However, let’s focus on the positive. The probes that, despite having no prospect of ever returning home, delivered far more science than anyone thought possible. So, here They are talking about NASA’s Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. These identical rovers touched down in early 2004 in what was planned to be a 90-day mission exploring the geology of the Martian surface. Their primary goal was to search for signs of past water activity. But their doom was sealed before they launched. Their designers knew that their solar panels would soon be covered by Martian dust drastically limiting their lifespan. But this time the alien atmosphere proved the savior, rather than the destroyer of robots. And right after landing, the power output of the rover’s panels dropped as expected, but inexplicably, sporadic recoveries of powers they have observed.

And if we talk about the Opportunity, NASA says that it still roves to this very day. Crazily, Opportunity is still fully operational, and still doing science. It has now traveled 45 kilometers across the Martian surface more than any other interplanetary surface vehicle. This way Spirit and Opportunity may have fought hard and long, but it was Cassini that made the ultimate sacrifice. This orbiter studied satellites and moons and rings for around 13 years. Cassini’s most incredible discovery is arguably that of hydrothermal vents of Enceladus. This moon is a world covered in ice but beneath that ice is a world-spanning ocean 30 kilometers deep, apparent from the geysers that occasionally erupt from the ice. Cassini found the presence of sand, ammonia, and organic molecules in the spray of these geysers, which tells us they are powered by hydrothermal vents on a solid ocean floor. This discovery of a potentially habitable environment on Enceladus only further sealed Cassini’s fate. One day, they will land probes on the moon and even drill into its ocean. On the remote chance that Cassini is carrying microbial contaminants from Earth and it crashes into Enceladus after decommissioning, a sacrifice had to be made. By decree of NASA’s awesomely named office of planetary protection.

On September 15th, 2017, Cassini was plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere, where it ended spectacularly in cleansing fire. The planetary protection agency has issued death sentences in the past. The Galileo probe was deorbited to Jupiter to protect its moons. In particular, Europa, which boasts a vast ocean under its icy crust. Juno, a probe sent to Jupiter in 2011 will meet the same fate in 2021. Where some spacecraft are destroyed to protect future science. In other cases, their destruction is a scientific experiment.

Some of the most mysterious entities in our solar system are the comets that dwell in the Kuiper belt, far outside our planetary system. These small icy bodies are thought to carry many secrets of our solar system’s formation. And to unlock the secrets of the comet, they have resorted to a time-honored approach to scientific inquiry. It was a probe launched by NASA in 2005 to impact comet Tempel 1. A large fraction of the spacecraft’s mass was a 370-kilogram impactor, a robotic probe on its own. The impactor guided itself headlong into Tempel 1 at 10 kilometers per second, delivering nearly 5 tons of TNT in kinetic impact energy and forming a rather 30 meters deep. 10s of millions of kilograms of comet They’re ejected in a debris cloud to be analyzed by the surviving spacecraft component of Deep Impact. The sacrifice of a deep impact significantly furthered our understanding of comets and paved the way for future ill-fated landers such as Philae. This lander for the Rosetta comet mission failed to deploy its harpoons during its 2014 landing attempt. This caused it to bounce into a region too shaded for its solar-powered operation. Even so, this stubborn little robot did manage to send back the first images from the surfaces of the comet and to detect some organic compounds that had never before been seen in comet material. It is now silently riding its eternal comet home into the distant Kuiper belt.

CONCLUSION

The robotic explorers have all found their final resting places. But the same can’t be said for the probes that were sent to the outer reaches of our solar system. Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons are all on trajectories that will fling them into interstellar space. Voyager 1 is already thee after 35 years of exploring our solar system; in 2012 it passed the boundary where the sun’s magnetic field and solar wind give away to the ambient environment of the Milky Way. Such as the long silent Pioneer spacecraft, Voyager 1 still sends faint radio signals bringing us our first and only direct measurements from beyond our home system. However, the signal is fading and its decaying plutonium power source will only support operations to 2025. After that Voyager 1 will meet its very lonely doom, perhaps floating forever in the coldness between the stars. So, as much as They such as to anthropomorphize, these robots are just robots. But perhaps it’s right to feel pride in their exploits and sadness in their demise. These engineers and scientists poured their own lives into these ingenious machines. And eventually, the real-life human explorers will follow these brave machines in the future and they will find inspiration from the sacrifices of the robots who gave their little silicon lives to blaze the very first paths into outer space-time.