Photos from the Surface of Venus (1982)

Wonderful use of the word venerable.

>Venera > Even the venerable...

Ha. Did you do that on purpose?

I swear I remember reading about "lenses made of diamonds" when I was a kid but I can't find anything now.

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.

They even deployed balloons in Venusian atmosphere back in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon

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.

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.

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'.

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.

I think I knew about it, because I think it was in the Time-Life book(s) about space exploration I read as a kid.

So maybe it's a myth that it was ignored or suppressed?

Interesting. I remember reading about it in high school science book in my country in asia, so maybe we can rule out Russia's tendency to not publicize failed missions.

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

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.

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.

Your comment reminded me of this breathtaking composite : https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/g6llys/p...

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

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.

We're about to spend $1.9T on pork under the guise of COVID-19 relief. $500M is pocket change.

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.

We do, since 1985 at least.

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

Batteries, wires, semiconductors, insulators that can work at 600°C are known. Magnets and with them electric motors are harder, neodymium magnets stop working, but you can still do with iron and cobalt magnets.

Generating power is also tricky, I have no idea how dark it is below the clouds, because all the photos are obviously adjusted to the dynamic range of displays. Possibly a nuclear-powered Stirling engine could just work, using some metal or salt with an appropriate boiling point.

You can cover the exterior metal parts of your craft with something like gold or platinum to protect against the acids.

This seems doable, but looks like much, much more work than a Mars lander which needs to operate in conditions similar to Antarctica, rather well studied and easily replicated.