[HN Gopher] Every picture from Venus' surface, ever (2021)
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Every picture from Venus' surface, ever (2021)
Author : austinallegro
Score : 89 points
Date : 2025-04-09 22:01 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.planetary.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.planetary.org)
| incognito124 wrote:
| Hope that changes with RocketLab
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Anything you send to Venus instantly fails; it would be
| tremendously expensive to try to collect more.
| dvh wrote:
| Balloon, long tether, hardened probe makes short trips to the
| surface. It could last for years.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The rough numbers I can find are that the acid cloud layer
| is ~75km thick, which seems awfully long for any kind of
| tether that'll have to support its own weight. With the low
| pressure (~0.1 ATM) it'd also need to be a rather big
| balloon.
|
| Further down, the ~100m/s (~220 mph) winds on the tether
| would likely try to drag everything sideways, scraping any
| probe across the landscape.
| perihelions wrote:
| Acid's a solved problem; PTFE (Teflon) is a comprehensive
| solution to hot sulfuric acid, well validated in chemical
| engineering problems on Earth. It's versatile enough you
| can even coat balloons with it [0].
|
| The hard part is keeping electronics cool. The balloon
| ideas offer a really elegant solution. You could cycle a
| balloon between altitudes--between the 500 degC surface,
| and cold layers of the high atmosphere, cooling off and
| refilling a thermal storage reservoir for the surface. On
| Venus, can find cool 20 degC air at a very reasonable,
| balloon-navigable, 0.5 bar pressure level [1].
|
| [0] https://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/news/up-up-and-away-to-
| venus/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus?#/m
| edia/Fi...
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I definitely would like to see that. The advantage with
| Venus is also that the turnaround times would be shorter
| compared to Jupiter or Saturn.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Still disappointed that it's not a swamp as promised by 20th C.
| sci-fi.
| p_j_w wrote:
| A dinosaur infested swamp, at that.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Odd that none of them show the horizon. Does anyone know why
| they're angled so low?
| curiousObject wrote:
| I assume because they knew they'd literally get only one shot.
| So imaging more of the nearby surface was the best use of that
| opportunity, for doing science.
|
| The Soviets had already landed a probe on Mars, which sent back
| the top few lines of a picture of the sky and then stopped
| scanning down, and died. So they must have not wanted a repeat
| of that disappointment!
|
| Probably, on Venus, the bandwidth and sensor tech just weren't
| enough for it to be possible to get more pixels in the time
| available? So they concentrated the effort on the nearest rocks
|
| Sadly that does make the photos visually sort of unimpressive,
| unlike all the splendid panoramic views America's Viking probes
| took of Mars. (Where the lander wasn't being pressure cooked
| and acid-etched in 20 minutes)
| pndy wrote:
| Just wanna point out the obvious thing just in case: "article" is
| from 2021 but photos are from '75 and '82
|
| http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm - here are few
| more; site may load really slowly.
|
| https://youtu.be/UEmlOjKmL68 - Asianometry video covering topic
| of Soviet Venera program
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(page generated 2025-04-12 23:02 UTC)