Would it be possible to make a camera that takes pictures mechanically? Like with gears and shit...

Apparently theres a layer of the upper atmosphere where pressure temperature and gas mix is almost the same as earth, if you could fly around up there you wouldnt need a suit or any special gear to survive

>you wouldnt need a suit or any special gear to survive

except for the fact there is no fucking oxygen to breathe

we have pressure vessels that can contain that.

But say we want a camera that last longer than a couple hours. Say for a rover or something.

OP here, I am autistic as fuck.

Bump

LMAO
Google Russian missions to Venus
Every single one died

>Venera mission

goddam, they fucked up 13 times

Yes, and they died because the heat eventually killed the electronics. Hence the need for a mechanical camera that can withstand the heat.

You could use the atmospheric pressure to run a a thermic machine and get the inside electronic cold, no?

It still needs to receive signals from earth and process/transmit them it cant be completely mechanical

What are you on about, Venera was a huge success. They did amazingly well actually

Can you use Earth's atmospheric pressure to run a thermic machine? No? Why would it work on Venus then?

You don't need to receive any information from earth if the rover can do enough interesting science before getting stuck on a rock and turning into a lander. Shit the sojourner rover only drove like 100 meters. Something that bumps around like a roomba could probably go reasonably far on flattish terrain.

You can process information mechanically. The Zuse Z1, a Turing complete mechanical computer, is perhaps on of the best example of this(pic related):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)

Using MEMS technology we can make stuff like the Z1, but smaller and faster. We won't be able to achieve frequencies on par with electronics, but good enough for doing simple shit. If we can process and transmit a pixel at 20 Hz, we can take a 128x512 photo in an hour, which is what the venera landers took.

We don't need our rover to have a transmitter on it. Information can be transmitted back, by having the rover modify incoming microwaves or radiowaves, just like passive radiobugs do.

You'd be better off designing a camera that worked off of vacuum tubes or relay logic if you are so desperate to avoid semiconductors.

Or you know, use semiconductors but design a housing to keep them cool and away from the sulfuric acid. (

I hope you really mean, couldn't we harvest wind power on venus to keep the electronics cold? Yes, but you need a fuck huge wind turbine. For a reasonably sized rover you can get like less than 10 watts at best and that's before you take into account putting a generator on it.

And before anyone asks why not use nukes? One, NASA is a huge miser when it comes to plutonium. Two, even if we had a nuclear reactor small enough to put on a rover, we'd need neutron proof electronics.

>>vacuum tubes or relay logic
I've considered it, but the problem is how do you actually sense images with these things? How do you go from light to electricity at these high temperatures?

So here's the deal, NASA is looking into using completely mechanical systems to explore really extreme environments in the solar system. This is not just venus and could include Earth's mantle, the insides of gas giants, volcanos, and places that are really fucking radioactive. Places where it will be very difficult to use electronics. Ever. If we had a completely mechanical camera that'd be fucking cool. Cause then we could take pictures in these places.

nasa.gov/feature/automaton-rover-for-extreme-environments-aree

>>use semiconductors but design a housing to keep them cool and away from the sulfuric acid.
that is the proper way to do it, but pretty much the only way to power the cooling is with plutonium, which NASA is really low on.

I don't know why you guys keep saying sulfuric acid. The concentration of sulfur dioxide is like 150 ppm at the surface.
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solar/venusenv.html

The only thing that really comes to mind is to design some sort of mechanism to burn a reflected image into a metal plate or something. I have no fucking idea how you would make that work though, or if an image created in such a manner would even be remotely useful.

Would there even be anything worth seeing on Venus? I mean I get that it would be cool and all, but I was under the impression that there isn't.

>>etch a reflected image into a metal plate or something
That might work, I'm just not sure what you'd use to make it work on Venus.

>>Would there even be anything worth seeing on Venus?
For one if you have a dumb rover like in that's going around randomly picking up rocks and putting them in balloons it would help to know where they came from.

Second, if you have mechanical device that can sense light, you might be able to do neat science shit. Like putting something horribly radioactive next to some venusian rocks and looking at the reflected radiation with phosphors.

Now what you really need a mechanical camera for is taking pictures from the 'surface' of a gas planet. When you reach a certain depth on a gas planet, the gas becomes a liquid. At these depths temperatures and pressures are really high. We do not have electronics that can work at these temperatures and probably will not either. However, we have materials that can remain solid at these temperatures and pressures which means we can make machines.

In fact diamond can exist as a solid quite deep into gas giants. There is even the possibility that the ice giant planets have oceans of liquid diamond(no seriously liquid diamond) with floating diamond icebergs:
phys.org/news/2010-01-oceans-liquid-diamond-neptune-uranus.html

Are you talking about a metal based Daguerreotype?

No clue really, I was just spitballing and that's the first thing that came to mind that didn't sound completley retarded in my head.

But yea, after googling digdugerinotype that sounds pretty much like I had in mind. Wonder if that would be at all feasible there?

Can silver halides even withstand high temperatures? And how do you turn the image produced into a mechanical signal you can get out?

Why wouldn't you just use a fairly temperature-tolerant digital camara, and then have a proper thermal management system?

Trying to operate the internals of a complex rover at the hellish temperatures on Venus is a losing strategy, regardless of whether those internals are electrical or mechanical. Nothing complex is going to last very long.

A thermal management system won't last long if it's not actively cooled. We don't have the plutonium to make it actively cooled.

We have materials that can withstand venusian surface temperatures(~462-500 C). The materials inside jet engines are good to 1300 C. And no venus' atmosphere isn't really made of acid.

For the photoreceptor grid, you could use an array of Crookes radiometers, connected to the display mechanism by nano-scale shafts that maintain the vacuum inside the bulb. The shafts would be met by gearing that rotates cylinders painted in grey-scale. (The cylinders would be on the opposite side of the plate-mechanism). A break could be applied to the shafts to fix the cylinders in place, which would take the picture.

The concept of a mechanical display already exists in sci-fi. Go to 8:25 here:
crunchyroll.com/bodacious-space-pirates/episode-12-a-return-from-eternity-588926

Why not just not use film, then? There's no law of physics saying that you can only take chemical photographs on celluloid.

I'm sure there's some photosensitive chemical reaction that will function at high temperatures on a more durable medium, like a metal plate. Possibly some kind of industrial photoresist, followed by exposing the plate to atmosphere or internal acid to etch it.

Interesting idea, but you need a temperature difference to drive a crooke's radiometer. Because it is thermally driven you might run into problems with IR emissions from the camera body fucking shit up.

If were doing shit thermally, a golay cell or bolometer would work much better.

>> display
Don't need that. I just want some sort of mechanical signal out, preferably at KHz frequencies. IE sound.

Well what chemicals would you use?

okay. So, cameras work by exposing "something" (digital cameras & film are different) to light. That's it, basically. Can it have mechanical elements? Absolutely.

But if you're describing a camera made entirely out of cogs, springs, and gears; No. Unless magic is real, obviously. Then you can do anything.

I really can't imagine anything other than a giant mechanical computer working.
But with nano technology we could probably make a much smaller mechanical computer.

...

You might have to find something else besides silver to do it with. And I imagine that you could just do the same thing that the rock balloons do and just float it on out of there afterwards so that the image can be picked up later.

>Semiconductors stop working at Venusian temperatures.
So refrigerate them, then.

We have not enough plutonium to do so

>We have not enough plutonium to do so
What makes you say that? The US is rebooting it's plutonium 238 production, and apparently Russia still makes it too.
Plus, those mechanical computers aren't going to be light on the power budget either.

>using MEMES technology
cool

There are mechanical technologies which allow light to cause a mechanism to operate without electronics but you then have the problem of getting the information back. Basically, if you can build a spacecraft that can land, sit and cook on Venus before taking off again (how else is it going to send the images back?) you're most of the way to making a camera that can also survive for long periods of time.

What mechanisms are these?

Because they have more on Venus

Solar valves.

The scariest part is that that goes on for tens of thousands of kilometers. Imagine walking through that all the way from New York to Sydney.

But the atmosphere would be so thick we couldn't see anything.

>except for the fact there is no fucking oxygen to breathe
hazard suit and oxygen tank aren't 'special' we have that shit on earth.

Kek no atmosphere is not that thick.

But actually though, not a bad idea. The only problem with taking mechanical pictures is getting the back to earth. At some point, you need electronics to transmit the data, unless you plan on having the probe return to orbit.

VENUSIAN ATMO CAN'T MELT STEEL CAMERAS

VENERA 11 WAS IN INSIDE JOB

Or fucking you know make a pressure vessel out of some corrosive resistant material and refrigerate the insides with a nuclear power source
(with a shit tone of RTG's or a fucking nuclear reactor)
God fucking damn it niggers.

> Film cannot exist at venusian conditions.
neither can cameras for that matter. for that matter, why the fuck would you need gears OR film. everything is digital for a reason... not that it will solve your acid rain problem but hey.

he means that the whole planet is covered in that, not that the atmosphere is thousands of kilometers tall.