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 and Aerostar 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.

翻译：本文详细介绍了为金星云层飞行而开发的浮力式空中机器人平台（即浮空机器人）成熟化进程中的一个重要里程碑。我们描述了两次按比例缩小的、具备高度控制能力的浮空机器人飞行试验，该原型机采用可在金星环境下生存的必要材料制造。在内华达州黑岩沙漠上空的飞行中，原型机所处的大气密度与金星54至55公里高度云层的大气密度完全相同。我们进一步阐述了一个基于第一性原理的浮空机器人动力学模型，该模型已通过内华达飞行数据验证，并用于预测未来金星浮空机器人的性能。本文讨论的浮空机器人正由JPL和Aerostar联合开发，计划用于一项金星原位探测任务，将实现多次环绕飞行，对金星大气的化学与物理特性进行采样，并遥感探测其表面特性。