Revitalizing Soviet Image Data From Venus

An anonymous reader writes "As everyone looks at Mars, a scientist has produced the best images ever obtained from the surface of a rather different planet - Venus. By using - and reprocessing - data from the Soviet Venera missions he got some really nice gems. To be found at BBC News Online and at mentallandscape.com. Nice images which resemble much that of the current Mars missions can be found here(1) and at here(2). By the way, did you know that Venus was more often targeted by space probes than Mars, including a number of ten (!) successful landers?"

Re:It's really cool that he's doing this ...

[sahonen]

You can use a parachute to land a craft on Venus, which is much easier and less demanding of the hardware than bouncing it to a stop.

Re:Whoops

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

I think those are some sort of protective lens covering that was ejected after the lander landed.

Tim

Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

The engineering requirements [mentallandscape.com] were absolutely insane - 170g on re-entry, jetisoning parachutes - then falling free for 50 miles through the atmosphere to land without a parachute. And when it gets there:

Conditions were 90 atm pressure and 455 C (851 F).

This is also intriguing:

While never deployed, a seismometer and thermopile battery were developed and tested, capable of operating indefinately on the surface of Venus.

I'm amazed that "nothing can last long on the surface of venus" is a myth - there seems to be no technical reason that we couldn't have instruments there permanently. This page also talks of electronics capable of surviving the heat - and that the landers interior was cooled by liquid lithium down to 60 degrees C. Then they lost contact only because the *relay* satelites weren't in a permanent orbit - not because the probes failed.

I'm in awe of the engineering that went into making these probes so robust - and this was before I was even born! NASA needs to think a little more like this if they're not going to have accidents getting to the moon permanently.

Re:excellent example

[ghostlibrary]

A lot of astronomy data is looked at by its principal investigator (PI) for something specific. Really, data has 5 'lives'.

1) The original proposal by the PI, e.g. 'looking for cornonal emissions from DI Peg, an Algol-type system'. Sort of the pass/fail of the research world.

2) Survey. Someone decides to do a survey study among existing data, e.g. "Light curves from all Algol-type systems".

3) Unexpected. Someone finds a new thing to look for, sometimes due to better theoretical understanding. "Coronal sources should be iron-enhanced, so let's reanalyze DI Peg, specifically looking for iron lines."

4) Data-mining. Searching an archive for a given property. "Looking for all sources with X-ray emission above a given threshold... hey, DI Peg matched!"

5) Grad students. Doing their thesis on a topic, use archival data to support. "Dissertation on coronal systems, using data from DI Peg and others".

and I think now maybe this adds a new category:

6) Improved methods. Older data can be reanalyzed using newer methods to extract additional information. Rare: usually data analysis is limited by signal/noise, not tricky algorithms.

So data is often used beyond its initial acquisition!

(apologies if I've posted this before)

Re:Whoops

[ColaMan]

One of the venera probes had a "spike" type soil density tester on an arm, which was basically under spring tension and was supposed to flip out from the lander and spear into the soil, to get an idea of how hard the ground was.

So, lens cap pops off, a few photos are taken, spike gets deployed, a few more photos taken to determine the depth the spike penetrated to....
except the spike manages to land in the exact same spot the lens cap is sitting. A rather solid lens cap, by the way.

Apparently there was a lot of cursing in russian at that point :-)

Re:It's really cool that he's doing this ...

[Urkki]

Or even easier to send it out of the entire solar system!

You see, the thing with space is that things don't just "fall in", any more than Earth does. If you reduce orbital speed, the orbit just becomes an ellipse. You have to kill almost all of the orbital speed before you would collide with Sun, and IIRC that speed change is actually *more* than what is needed for exiting the solar system entirely.