Soviet Space Image Catalog | Hacker News Reader

Soviet Space Image Catalog

mentallandscape.com

153 pointsbenbreen27 comments

Here's a 2006 news story about Don Mitchell's processing of data from old Soviet Venus missions. Amazing stuff.

"Mitchell obtained the original data from the two landers with the help of the designer of the Venera cameras, Yuri Gektin.... By calibrating a new camera function, Mitchell was able to tease out many of the very dark and very light regions caught by Venera cameras — details not brought out in the original Russian photo reduction work. This process revealed, at least in the case of Venera-13, hazily seen distant hills."

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14786868/ns/technology_and_science...

Sorry, fat finger accidentally down voted, meant to up vote! Great piece of information, fascinating that such information is still there to be teased out!

Does "original data" mean some sort of recording of an analog (think NTSC, etc) signal? Or is it sent digital?

I love the Venus photos that the Soviet landers managed to take. Sure, they're terrible quality, but they're currently the only images we have from Venus.

I wonder if, with more modern technology, it would be possible to design a Venus lander that could last longer than the short period that the Venera landers did.

I was amazed that they managed to beam a clear photo back from a probe they'd safely landed on the distant planet at all! Venus is incredibly inhospitable so I was very impressed at the engineering required to do this, particularly as it was the 1970s (and we think 1980s 8 bit computers are rubbish!)

Likely they could, but consider instead doing a Venus Orbiter similar to the Mars orbiter. With some technology behind he perhaps it could deploy kite/sail like probes that slowly dip their way through the atmosphere.

We probably don't go back simply because the environment is so hostile the idea of landing man there is not possible and hence we concentrate on Mars which holds other allure aswell

There is an idea of deploying floating habitats on Venus - apparently an air-filled balloon would float above the hostile layers of gases, and you could still extract some unseful materials from the atmosphere itself. I hope they'll at least try sending a long-duration unmanned airship there.

Yeah their Venera program was fantastic. It is too bad the West doesn't know more about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera

It actually started with a fly-by in 1961

I've looked at those photos of Venus probably a thousand times. Still, every time I come across them I just stare at them thinking, over and over again, "This photo is from another planet. In space." Followed quickly by "Oh man, we're also floating in space" and then reassuring myself that gravity is doing it's job and we're not going to float away and we're pretty well stuck to the sun. Crisis averted.

I usually add "Wow, underneath all that crushing atmosphere Venus doesn't look that different from Earth."

I'm in no way a conspiracy theoirst wrt. space exploration, but a follow-up question popped to my mind immediately: those pictures are so Earth-like that how do we know they were made on Venus?

(I assume there was a way for the global scientific community to independently verify that this data indeed came from space)

That's harder than you might think...

I suspect they could send a lander to the same location and if the rock formations matched up that would probably count.

The latest Mars expedition did gave us quite detailed video of the landing. I thought that maybe they have videos of the whole trip across space, even in crude low res. form.

Just an FYI, The 4 images are links to the galleries they represent. It took me a second at first to realize that.

Amazing. My grandpa was one of the leading architects for some of this work (mostly lunar probes out of all the ones listed there). It is pretty spectacular to see what people managed to achieve back in those times. Wish I got to meet him. Thanks for posting this.

It just so happens that the Russians launched a military imaging satellite into a polar orbit a few hours ago. Supposedly it's the first of a new generation that does digital imaging and no longer uses film:

http://sen.com/news/russia-launches-bars-m1-classified-milit...

Here is the page I wrote in 2003, about the Soviet Exploration of Venus. You can find links to the images that I processed.

http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm

Returned-film camera systems were the highest quality Earth-imaging technology until recent linear CCD cameras. In America, returned-film systems were forbidden for civilian use

I tied to find information about these "returned-film" cameras but my Google-fu failed me. Does anyone know anything about it?

BTW, information about the other type of cameras, CCD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device

I think they mean satellites where the film canister is physically returned to earth.

See paragraph 7 of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)#Technology

any idea what the soviet copyright policy is on these images? in the US NASA images are always in the public domain ...

My understanding is that copyright is null if it relates to a state that doesn't exist anymore. I think it's almost always safe to assume that Soviet-produced images are public domain.

Looks like that instead of defaulting on copyrights, the transitional period was able to enforce retroactive copyrighting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Uni...

Fascinating subject, though!

I don't think that makes sense; in most other aspects, there's the concept of a successor state. Russia took hold of international assets, commitments and liabilities of Soviet Union. This included things like membership in the UN Security Council, commitments to SALT, or NNPT (with the related commitments to respecting Ukrainian sovereignty now quite clearly breached), the place in the Ice Hockey World Cup A Series, ownership of embassy properties all over the world, and whatever you can imagine.

I don't see why copyright to Venus pictures would be much different, if any copyright was reserved in the first place.

I think this ( the place in the Ice Hockey World Cup A Series) went to the unified team first?

I think you refer to the Olympics where there was the Unified Team (under Olympic flag). I think the Commonwealth of Independent States played friendlies only.

But I used wrong name for tournament: what I meant was the World Championships (played every year), not the World Cup (a rare event, now planned for 2016). There Russia was a successor to USSR after 1991.

No idea, but assuming it belongs to Russia, I'm sure they're okay with pictures that make the Soviet space program look good being shared.

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