If we already know the conditions of various planets and moons, why can’t we recreate them on Earth to use to build probes for them?
In: Physics
There is no need to recreate planetary conditions to build probes. We don’t have any serious issues building probes already, and we have landed probes on other planets and moons. Some worlds like Venus and Titan have been visited by probes which promptly died once entering the atmosphere, but that was by design; it’s not as though we weren’t expecting it.
I was under the impression that planets like Jupiter or Saturn are too stormy, with no real surface to land on and gravity too strong. It would make trying to go into these planets a very expensive thing to do for not much we don’t already know.
Although I’m not sure about moons like Ceres, or Europa and Ganymede? You would think it would be pretty easy to land a probe on one of those planets.
We already do this extensively. The mars curiosity rover (or its earthly copy) was driven through rocky desert terrain a number of times to see how it would perform on mars. The new mars helicopter was flown in a large, sealed chamber where they made the atmosphere just as thin as it is on mars and used a rope to take some of the weight off to simulate mars gravity.
If you mean for developing the missions, you can. There are plenty of similar (geologically) landscapes to the Moon on Earth that were used for training the Apollo astronauts.
We do actually do this. I know of Venus simulation chambers that will do high pressures, temperatures, and corrosive environments. There are also things like cryo vacuum chambers to simulate the icy surface of moons like Europa and Enceladus.
The reason you don’t see a lot of them or really big ones is because they’re expensive to build, maintain, and operate. A technology has to do a lot of proving prior to being able to be tested in these sorts of environments.
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