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

Researchers and technology developers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), other government agencies, academia, and industry recently met in Pasadena, California, to take stock of past and current work and future challenges in the application of AI to highly autonomous systems. In our lifetime, through the eyes of simple robots, grand vistas on other worlds have been unveiled for the first time. Enigmatic questions compel us to go further, to touch these distant landscapes and learn the secrets of the solar system. However, in trying, we find our reach wanting, limited by the link to Earth on which our probes depend. We are learning that to explore further, these probes must go alone, and to go alone, they must become much more intelligent.