TOBIAS

NASA

TOBIAS: Tethered Observatory for Balloon-based Imaging and Atmospheric Sampling

Ben HockmanNASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory A basketball-sized towbody containing a camera, atmospheric sampling instruments, and support hardware is suspended on a multi-kilometer tether from a high-altitude balloon in the Venusian atmosphere, allowing it to peer beneath the dense cloud layer and image the surface at high resolution. The towbody harvests energy from the differential wind shear via an onboard wind…