Silicon Carbide for Venus Explorations: Enabling Technology for Extreme Environments!
Were Silicon Carbide chips which can shatter the 100°C temperature limit of silicon chips used in Venus missions? The short answer is no, not yet—but they are the exact technology that will make future Venus surface missions possible.
No space agency has successfully landed a probe on Venus since the Soviet Union’s Vega 2 in 1985. In all past Venus missions (both Soviet and NASA), standard silicon-based electronics were used.
Here is how the shift from standard silicon to Silicon Carbide (SiC) is completely changing how we approach Venus:
The Problem with Past Missions
Because standard silicon chips fail catastrophically at Venus’s surface temperatures (~470°C or 878°F), past landers had to rely on massive, heavy titanium pressure vessels and phase-change cooling systems to keep the internal electronics at room temperature.
Even with armor akin to a deep-sea submarine, the Venusian heat and pressure always won. The longest any lander ever survived on the surface was 2 hours and 7 minutes (the Soviet Venera 13) before the thermal protection failed, the silicon chips fried, and the probe died.
The NASA Silicon Carbide Breakthrough
In the mid-2010s, engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center decided to stop fighting the heat and instead build electronics that could simply survive it. They began fabricating integrated circuits out of Silicon Carbide.
To test them, NASA used the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig (GEER)—a massive steel chamber that perfectly replicates the 470°C heat, the crushing 92-atmosphere pressure, and the highly corrosive, sulfuric-acid-laced atmosphere of Venus.
When they placed their bare, unshielded SiC chips directly into the chamber (with no cooling or protective packaging whatsoever), the chips functioned perfectly for over 60 days before the engineers simply turned the machine off. It was a monumental breakthrough in planetary science.
The Future: The LLISSE Probe
Because of this SiC breakthrough, NASA is currently developing a new type of Venus lander called LLISSE (Long-Lived In-situ Solar System Explorer).
Instead of a massive, 500-kilogram armored lander that survives for an hour, LLISSE is a tiny 10-kilogram cube (about the size of a toaster). Because all of its internal sensors, communication arrays, and processors are built from Silicon Carbide, it doesn’t need any thermal shielding.
When it eventually launches in the coming years, LLISSE will be dropped onto the surface of Venus and is expected to sit there measuring weather, wind, and chemistry for at least 60 Earth days—transmitting data back to an orbiter the entire time.