[HN Gopher] Photos from the Surface of Venus (1982)
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Photos from the Surface of Venus (1982)
Author : uptown
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-02-19 13:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| mthwl wrote:
| These are composites, not the actual photos, if I recall
| correctly. The perspective is shifted and I guess the horizon is
| just inferred from the corners?
|
| I haven't found great, high-res sources, but the real photos are
| on the Venera Smithsonian page here:
| https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/web12184-20116...
| aimor wrote:
| I really liked this explanation of how the photos were
| transmit. I believe Don Mitchell was able to find the original
| data files for some of the transmissions and rebuild the photos
| in higher quality:
|
| http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
| surfsvammel wrote:
| That's cool. I did not know that. So we have one blue planet, one
| yellow planet and one red planet. It amazes me that the planets
| in the solar system are so different.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of this breathtaking composite :
| https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/g6llys/p...
| wiz21c wrote:
| All these deserts render Earth as super incredible.
| jiofih wrote:
| How did they recover the data? Was it transmitted through the
| thick atmosphere?
| gene-h wrote:
| 32 cm band transmission to an orbiter as a relay[0]. The
| atmosphere of Venus is thick, but does not strongly absorb
| radio and microwave frequencies. Even the clouds on Venus
| really aren't all that thick.
|
| [0]http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/radioind/MVradio/MVradio.htm
| akiselev wrote:
| Feels weird seeing a (1982) tag on an article pointing to a
| twitter URL
| jessriedel wrote:
| Perhaps there is some sound analysis that can be to extract usual
| info from that audio track, but as far as my ears can tell it's
| just brown noise. It's like reading the output of a RNG that
| operated on the surface of Venus; it's hard to say you've learned
| anything about the planet. (I mean, you've learned the average
| sound level is above some threshold, but that was pretty obvious
| from the windspeed data!)
| shireboy wrote:
| Was sitting here wondering that. Are some of those sounds from
| the lander? Sounds like lots of wind and some mechanical sounds
| - or perhaps metal being corroded by sulfuric acid and
| excruciating heat.
| tokai wrote:
| Yeah there are sounds from the lander. From the drill and a
| lens cap coming off with explosive bolts I think.
|
| Edit: This video have tags for events in the audio.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3Ife6iBdsU
| jessriedel wrote:
| Great find! Of course, (as you say) other than uniform wind
| static you can basically only hear the sound of the drill
| and explosive bolts brought by the probe. Still, I was
| surprised to learn the windspeed at the surface is so slow.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| We have photos from the surface Titan too!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Huygens_surface_color_sr....
| divbzero wrote:
| It's cool how rocks on Venus, Mars, and Titan are all quite
| recognizable. You could easily imagine those photos being taken
| somewhere on Earth.
| wiz21c wrote:
| At the same time these are all so barren... It's somehow
| frightening to me.
| egfx wrote:
| then how about this one from the surface of a comet
| https://imgur.com/fWvd3wS
| sephamorr wrote:
| Semi-related: I don't know about this image in particular,
| but many images taken off-Earth have their white balance
| adjusted so they look the way they would under Earth
| lighting. I'm aware this is done frequently for images from
| Mars, where the images are adjusted so Geologists can compare
| Martian rock colors to those of their Earth experience.
| boulos wrote:
| If you enjoy Soviet space exploration and Venus in particular,
| follow Don Mitchell's "archaeology" in the area. His old website
| [1] still has great things on it, but he's since moved to Twitter
| unfortunately [2]. But at least posting this has let me see that
| Don is getting back into rendering (albeit I'm sure it's for his
| space interests [3]).
|
| [1] http://mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm
|
| [2] https://mobile.twitter.com/donaldm38768041
|
| [3]
| https://mobile.twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1362219784...
| rdiddly wrote:
| Most people in America didn't know about the Venera program,
| including me who was at the peak of my adolescent interest in
| "space stuff" at the time. I don't know whether to blame it on
| Russia's tendency not to publicize failed missions, or an
| American tendency to ignore or suppress news of successful
| Russian ones. So I just blame it generically on "Cold War
| bullshit" and figure I'm covered either way.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Sounds like I'm about your age. I remember Venera being in the
| news and discussed at school in physics class (teacher was a
| bit of a "space" enthusiast).
|
| It definitely did not get the media attention that NASA
| missions got, but it seems likely that news of NASA missions
| didn't get much play in the USSR either. Cold war was still on,
| as you say.
| jfultz wrote:
| Every faithful watcher of the Six Million Dollar Man series in
| 1977 and 1978 had at least some awareness of the Soviet Venus
| probe program. A two-part episode in 1977, and another two-
| parter in 1978 featured the so-called "Death Probe", a Soviet-
| made Venus probe which was (accidentally in 1977, and
| intentionally in 1978) unleashed on Earth instead, autonomously
| fulfilling its mission to "explore" its environs through
| various acts of violence and destruction supposedly suited for
| the hostile terrain of Venus. Because the probe was designed to
| operate on the surface of Venus, it was nearly indestructible.
|
| It's kind of a silly premise, but this was the single most
| memorable antagonist for Steve Austin from my childhood viewing
| of the show. And...I don't remember how I knew this, or how
| much it was discussed in connection with the show, but I knew
| that there really were Soviet Venus surface probes that this
| story was (very loosely) based on.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Last night I was talking to a mechanical engineer friend _who
| worked at JPL_ and he didn 't know about the Venera program!
|
| I like to bring up Venus whenever Mars is in the news. It's so
| much more interesting to me than the tiny, dark dust bowl we
| keep probing.
| basementcat wrote:
| Not everyone at JPL knows about every single space mission
| anyone has ever launched. Not everyone at Apple has the OSX
| syscall table memorized. Not everyone at Exxon knows about
| every single oil field.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Even this week there's definitely a lack of publication of the
| Soviet successes. As in articles giving a history of Mars
| landings and omitting the first landing, Mars3 from mention.
|
| Wording i've seen. "USA is the only country to successfully
| land on Mars". "Chinas Tiawan-1 will make china the second
| country to successfully land on Mars." etc. The wording is
| subtle and arguably accurate but the omission is obvious.
|
| Here's an exact example of this i just read: "If successful,
| China will become the second country, after the US, to land and
| operate a rover on the Martian surface." Source:
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22276153/china-reaches-ma...
|
| The above is completely true. Whilst the Soviet Mars3 lander
| landed and it did transmit telemetry after landing its rover
| failed to deploy and since it was in a dust storm it didn't
| last long at all, it only lasted 20 seconds. So you can say
| limit your definition to exclude Mars3. Still if you're talking
| about the history of space missions to mars limiting the
| definition very precisely to exclude this is odd.
|
| It's a bit like if the USA landed a probe on Venus tomorrow
| that happened to transmit for more than an hour and then
| running headlines "NASAs probe is the first probe to land on
| Venus and transmit for more than an hour". It's not at all
| wrong. But geez that's a very interesting way to define things
| so that you don't have to say 'second'.
| user982 wrote:
| When it's mentioned at all, Sally Ride is sometimes called
| the second-ever woman in space (e.g.,
| https://www.businessinsider.com/sally-ride-first-american-
| wo...). She wasn't; she was the third, and 20 years after the
| first.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| They even deployed balloons in Venusian atmosphere back in the
| 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The Venera program was profoundly significant:
|
| 1965: First landing on another planet (crash)
|
| 1967: First spacecraft to transmit data from another planet's
| atmosphere.
|
| 1970: First spacecraft to transmit data from another planet's
| surface.
|
| It's amazing they did all this in the 60s and 70s.
| nemo44x wrote:
| We had commercial supersonic passenger flight in the
| mid-70's. We don't today. But we do have more affordable
| commercial flight I suppose.
|
| The Cold War was great for tech investment and research
| without a clear profit motive.
| f6v wrote:
| You also could just have millions of people working
| directly or indirectly for the benefit of those programs.
| To beat the "enemies" to it. It was a golden age for space
| exploration.
| gene-h wrote:
| Technically the Venera probe itself didn't melt. The solder in
| its electronics did. Higher temperature solder could have been
| used, but this would not have made a difference in the end
| because silicon stops behaving as a semiconductor past a certain
| temperature. Silicon carbide does not though and we're starting
| to make ICs that can function at Venusian temperatures. Even the
| venerable 555 timer/comparator has been made to function at
| Venusian temperatures[0].
|
| [0]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8782125
| nostromo wrote:
| We should give up on landers and start sending weather balloons
| to Venus. The upper atmosphere is very earthlike.
| codeulike wrote:
| Nice artists impression of the Venera 9 lander on the surface
|
| https://iaaa.org/venera-9-on-venus/
|
| The design of the lander is fascinating
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_9
|
| edit: An an artists impression of Venera 13
| https://www.planetary.org/space-images/artists-impression-of...
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's disappointing that the NASA model of space exploration (few,
| expensive, long-lived complicated devices) means that we'll
| probably not get better pictures of the surface of Venus for
| quite a while. They just aren't going to fund a $500mm lander
| that lives for 4 hours.
|
| If SpaceX had the money, I'm sure they would throw a lander a
| month at Venus, iterating on the longevity and quality. But I
| don't see that happening anytime soon.
| giantrobot wrote:
| SpaceX doesn't do self-funded science projects. I'm not really
| sure where you get that impression.
|
| More to the point though, Venus is extremely inhospitable. On
| the surface the temperature is hundreds of degrees and the
| atmospheric pressure is equivalent to about 900m below the
| ocean on Earth. The solar flux at the surface is also too low
| for a lander to use solar panels.
|
| So even if NASA or whomever wanted to spam Venus with landers,
| there's no real way to make them low cost as their main mission
| lifespan would be measured in hours _at best_.
|
| Because of the surface pressure a lander would need to carry
| robust shielding for instruments and electronics. Because of
| the surface temperature the lander components will eventually
| overheat. Thicker shielding will delay the overheating but that
| eats into the lander mass budget for science payload.
|
| Photovoltaics are out for power so the only options are
| chemical batteries or an RTG. An RTG isn't a realistic option
| since the environmental temperature is too high for it to cool
| and keep from melting.
|
| Some sort of buoyant probe design isn't all that practical
| either. While upper parts of Venus' atmosphere are more
| hospitable than the surface, there's clouds of sulphuric acid
| and incredible winds to deal with. The density of the
| atmosphere is such that there's only a few kilometers of
| visibility so probe's floating in the lower density upper
| atmosphere wouldn't have any better ability to image the
| surface than orbiters.
|
| So you're looking at Venus landers that look more like
| bathyspheres (no rovers) powered by chemical batteries. You're
| dropping them into an extremely high pressure furnace where
| they have a life expectancy of minutes to hours. I don't know
| how you'd expect to do such missions at a discount. Even if you
| somehow got the mission cost to a low tens on millions of
| dollars you're looking at ones of megabytes of scientific data
| for that price.
|
| Space is hard and some parts of space are super hard. Funding
| is finite so getting the best scientific ROI is important.
| Littering Venus with steel spheres and parachutes for a few
| megabytes of data doesn't have nearly the return of a rover on
| Mars.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| I don't think that's a fair assessment. It's not just about the
| cost, but about what science could be done. Much of the basic
| science has already been done by Venera, Mariner, Pioneer, and
| Magellan (Magellan providing a gravitational map of the entire
| surface of Venus). Here's a list of the many missions to Venus
| [1]
|
| So future missions not only need to justify costs, but actually
| overcome some pretty extraordinary engineering problems of
| doing science in such conditions.
|
| If you look at Mars for instance, where conditions are placid
| by comparison, we still have failures. The Insight lander for
| instance failed to dig into the Martian surface due to
| underestimating the friction of the surface material.
|
| So think of Mars as a learning tool for future space
| exploration.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Venus
| f6v wrote:
| Space isn't just about the basic science. We could advance
| engineering with projects like HAVOC [1] That could be
| indispensable if we ever need to use it on a more
| "interesting" planet.
|
| 1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operation
| a...
| himinlomax wrote:
| > It's not just about the cost, but about what science could
| be done
|
| I'd argue that's not the issue either. We can keep a probe on
| Mars or in any orbit for years and gather data over that
| time. Anything that we land on Venus can only ever operate
| for a few minutes. Maybe there's stuff we could learn on
| Venus if we could stay there long term, but we can't. Any
| other target (Mars, Mercury, gas giant satellites, asteroids,
| dwarf planets ...) will have a better ROI, by several orders
| of magnitude.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Heck I'd argue you'll get more science from trying to build
| something that survives on Venus than from Venus itself.
|
| Faint recollection, but I think at some point there were
| SiC semiconductors mentioned to try and survive longer.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Given that we're dozens of landers down on Mars -- many of
| them modern -- and we still have a ton to learn about the
| soil and history (ie, we are still landing science rovers
| there, as recently as this week), it doesn't really make
| sense to me that a few probes from the 80s have done all the
| on-the-ground science we want to do on Venus.
| est31 wrote:
| Even on earth we have still lots to learn about its
| geology, and 100% of our geologists live on its surface. It
| never stops. Each answered questions opens two new ones.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| We're about to spend $1.9T on pork under the guise of COVID-19
| relief. $500M is pocket change.
| himinlomax wrote:
| There's not much you can iterate on Venus. It's a pressure
| cooker down there hot enough to melt lead. There's no way a
| probe can last more than a few minutes on the ground. With a
| huge investment, you could maybe double that, but in any case
| you're going to hit diminishing returns really fast. I'm not
| sure we would even know how to design a refrigeration system
| that would work at those temps, let alone how to power it, and
| I'm also pretty sure we don't know how to make anything
| electronic that works at those temps.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| NASA is working on some mechanical computer concepts https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton_Rover_for_Extreme_En...
| dzdt wrote:
| We are close to having microelectronics that can function at
| Venus surface temperature and pressure. Examples tested
| include smallish circuits like a 555 timer [1] or a 256 pixel
| sensor array [2]. The Silicon Carbide technology seems very
| capable.
|
| [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8782125/
| [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8959229/
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