12 ms·
Soviet Venus Images (2004)
- 42droids 5y agoAbsolutely fascinating. The technology that already existed in the 60’s and 70’s is mind boggling. Also, there is something really exciting about looking at pictures of an alien planet. :)
- sixothree 5y agoI might be wrong (I hope I am), but these are the only pictures I know of the surface of Venus. They really are incredible.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoYou are not wrong. Only two Venera probes landed and transmitted pictures during a limited time window before succumbing to the harsh conditions. (Other probes did land and send data but it was scientific measurements, not pictures).
- melling 5y agoTechnology developed fast. Sputnik was in 1957. 20 years later we had: The United States landed probes on Mars in 1976. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program The Voyager program: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 The Space Shuttle was developed in the 1970’s Supersonic commercial flight… bullet trains in Japan and France… As a kid in the 1970’s, I imagined 2021 would be much more futuristic.
- skhr0680 5y agoI’m imagining talking to a person in 1971 and saying one of these things about the future is true and one is a lie: In 50 years, even people in the worlds poorest countries will have be able to send a letter that arrives instantly to any place in the world, have a color camera and video camera that can take almost unlimited photos and that you can view immediately and send to your friends instantly, a TV that can watch any TV program or movie ever filmed, a record player with all of the music in the world, a library with every book, a clock that is never wrong, a TV phone that can call anyone on the planet for free, a computer more powerful than every computer currently on the planet added together, a map of the entire world that knows where you are and can tell you how to get to anywhere you want to go to, in one candy bar sized piece of glass, that they all carry around in their pocket. or In 50 years, the US and Soviets will have colonized the entire solar system, and traveling to space will be as mundane to people then as riding the bus is now.
- ansgri 5y agoYou’d better add more details to the second option to make it fair, there’s a cognitive bias that leads to a more detailed option being more believable.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoThe first option while more detailed focused entirely on advances in computing and digital signal processing; this was mostly unknown to laypeople in the seventies. So despite the level of detail, it’s likely that random people on the street would have considered the second option more likely / true, since the space race and Cold War were front-page news every day.
- pmlnr 5y ago> a TV that can watch any TV program or movie ever filmed > a library with every book LOL. Reality wants a word with it's licenses and DMCA-s.
- skhr0680 5y agoHey, who said anything about paying?
- pmlnr 5y agoIt's not just the question of paying. There are so many movies, series, etc, especially dubbed ones, that only exist in closed, offline archives, and licensing prevents them from being digitalised at all.
- nomdep 5y agoEven blockbuster movies. Does anyone remember the movie “Cocoon”? Is impossible to watch it now unless you can find it in an old VHS tape
- 5y ago
- The_rationalist 5y agoMajor advances have been killed because of death aversion e.g The space shuttle. There was a human error and had they double/triple checked it would have been avoided. Anyway the human life cost is hypocrisy, with the budget they have and considering the gigantic number of avoidable deaths on earth through money they could have gotten a net life ratio by divesting e.g 0.1% of their budget, it's all inept media politics. In consequence, many things that were possible are no longer. About supersonic airflight, the Concorde was sabotaged, it was again much more safe than e.g driving a car and it was sabotaged economically by making illegal all air route except the transatlantic one. I'm unconvinced the bang from going beyond the speed of sound is that much of an issue, and they could done it higher in the air if needed? Anyway there are many technologies nowadays that reduce this noise, unfortunately the time to market and legal inept inertia will make us wait for another number of decades until this majorly useful technology come back. About maglevs and void tunnels trains I don't know why it doesn't pan out, must be too expensive, probably.
- u801e 5y ago> As a kid in the 1970’s, I imagined 2021 would be much more futuristic. In the 1970s, we had calculator watches. Now we have smartphones. So that's one way to look at it :)
- melling 5y agoIf we are thinking in half a century, the Wright Brothers first flew in 1903 and Chuck Yeager went faster than sound in 1947. Sure, some things have greatly improved in the last 50 years. Color television was a big thing in the late 60’s. Now we’ve gone from analog to digital at 4K on huge flat panels.
- divbzero 5y agoTIL: Vega-1 and Vega-2 did ~10,000 km and ~8,000 km flybys of Halley’s Comet. Vega-2’s photo of the potato-shaped nucleus is stunning.
- enriquto 5y agoHalley looks eerily similar to Churimov-Gerasimenko [0] in that image! I wonder if this dumbbell shape is common in comets and why should that be. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasime...
- miej 5y agospecifically with regard to your question, you may find this research interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07660 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07660 also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektite
- noduerme 5y agoThis is a pretty awesome use of manual image processing. It's amazing that so much of the exposed surface rock looks like slate. It's strange when you consider there's no continental uplift to expose metamorphic rock.
- areoform 5y agoYou have an amazing eye! This is actually a research question that the DAVINCI+ mission aims to explore, are there/were there active volcanoes on Venus up until the recent past? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessera_(Venus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessera_(Venus)
- noduerme 5y agoWow. This is a fascinating set of models. And they're about why these rocks are on the surface! Impact events make sense, but the atmosphere is so thick, burning up meteors, it seems like the chances of landing right by an exposed set of rock like that from a recent enough impact would be fairly slim. The downwelling/convection model makes a little more sense. That was what I was trying to figure out. Not an astro-geologist here, just a garden variety HN dropout designer/coder. But I always secretly wanted to work for NASA. I appreciate the kind word. This definitely sparked my curiosity ;)
- areoform 5y agoYou always can! There are tons of outreach communities, and good design + programming skillsets are always needed. If you're on ClubHouse, I'm happy to invite you to Small Steps & Giant Leaps, we have regular "rooms" with folks at NASA, ESA, the private space industry and (soon) JAXA. https://twitter.com/StepsLeaps https://twitter.com/StepsLeaps
- noduerme 5y agoAw man that sounds so great. I'm not on any of those platforms. But I wanted to share this with you. When I was about 7-8 years old, my best friend's dad worked at JPL. He gave me this folder with a thick stack of 8x10 color glossy photos, explanations on the back, from the Voyager missions. I keep it on my bookshelf. I just scanned a few for you. This is the stuff I grew up with. You can contact me @ the owner of said website. [edit] I've been crawled 45 times by Baidu in the last 15 minutes so . uh. I'm taking that link down. I really would love to continue this conversation and just add my brain to the mix if there's some cool way to do that.
- sanmartin65 5y agoAre you working for startups or make startups here I curate deals from 25+ platforms on software, saas and many more must check https://waybelow.omkarbirje.com https://waybelow.omkarbirje.com
- mickhead23 5y agoAmazing little detail about one of the lander camera lens cap sticking due to the high pressure atmosphere.
- pmlnr 5y agoofftopic: websites like this are the ones people missing when they are referring to "the old web" - see the bottom of it, C 2003-2004. It's 15 years old.
- cletus 5y agoIt's wild we have any images of the surface of Venus at all given how hostile Venus is. Given how hostile it is, it seems unlikely we'll go back anytime soon. These images were really a product of the Cold War where the US focused on Mars. It's worth noting that Venus is still probably a better terraforming target than Mars [1]. This romantic notion of Mars has rooted itself deeply at this point (eg with Elon Musk) but Mars is basically a more distant and inconvenient Moon. Almost no atmosphere (in fact, just enough because dust storms will occasionally just coat all your equipment), the Sun is weaker and gravity is still very low. Venus's atmosphere is about 3% nitrogen and 97% CO2. It has about 100x the atmosphere of Earth, which means there's actually more atmospheric nitrogen than on Earth. And abundant CO2 means oxygen is abundant. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I
- Clewza313 5y agoTemperatures on the surface of Venus are around 500 deg C, the pressure is around 90 Gs and the atmosphere is actively corrosive with superheated sulphur dioxide etc. While you may indeed be right about terraforming, settling on Mars seems like a cakewalk by comparison.
- mattowen_uk 5y agoI had a fictional concept of gas mining in the atmosphere of Venus (like Bespin's Cloud City) but I couldn't think of a way to mitigate corrosion of the materials you'd use to build it by the sulphur dioxide... (On Venus at 50 miles up, the atmospheric pressure is approximately the same as Earth, whereas on the surface it's the equivalent pressure of Earth's Mariana trench.)
- cletus 5y agoIf we're talking about what humanity's future off Earth might look like, it's actually highly unlikely that it's on planets at all, given how hostile such places are, the huge energy costs of entering and leaving gravity wells and how inefficient planets are at creating living area per unit mass. Orbital habitats using spin gravity seem way more likely with places like the Moon and Mercury being the source for the required raw materials.
- codeulike 5y agoThe design of the Venera landers is fascinating, wikipedia has some good pictures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera The probes were optimized for surface operations with an unusual looking design that included a spherical compartment to protect the electronics from atmospheric pressure and heat for as long as possible. Beneath this was a shock absorbing "crush ring" for landing. Above the pressure sphere was a cylindrical antenna structure and a wide dish shaped structure that resembled an antenna but was actually an aerobrake. They were designed to operate on the surface for a minimum of 30 minutes. Instruments varied on different missions, but included cameras and atmospheric and soil analysis equipment. All four landers had problems with some or all of their camera lens caps not releasing.
- amelius 5y agoWhat is that ladder doing in the images?
- boulos 5y agoI assume you’re talking about the “leg” in the left. The “rungs” would have been for reinforcement.
- The_rationalist 5y agoMore spectacularly we have audio from venus https://youtu.be/P3Ife6iBdsU https://youtu.be/P3Ife6iBdsU It's unfortunate we only have the audio from one landing, the other one is in the archives and is in a weird encoding that needs engineering to be reconstructed (like for a phonautograph)
- anonymousiam 5y agoNot a Soviet mission, but Magellan, built by Hughes Space & Communications Group in the 1980s, did an extensive survey of the surface of Venus using RADAR. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/magellan/in-depth/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/magellan/in-depth/ Edit: The Wikipedia page says; "The spacecraft was designed and built by the Martin Marietta Company,[5] and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) managed the mission for NASA." It has no mention of Hughes other than partial credit under "Manufacturer". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_(spacecraft) Hughes built the Synthetic Aperture RADAR payload.
- audiometry 5y agoWhy did USSR pursue Venus? Surely a far harder target for success than Mars. (At least given the nasty planetary conditions). Imagine how cool it would be to have worked on something that landed on Venus. Whew.
- m4rtink 5y agoAFAIK mainly probe lifetime - at least early on the Soviets had a lot of issues with that. For Venus you only have to keep the probe working for a month or tu max, for Mars it needs two survive for almost a year at the minimum.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThe successful Venus landers had operational lives on the ground ranging from 23 minutes to 2 hours. Months would have been phenomenal successes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
- m4rtink 5y agoI should have been more precise - I should have said probe flight times. The few early Soviet Mars probes that survived launch died on the way before they could reach the planet. For Venus transit the whole thing needs to keep working for much shorter time before descent module lands and the mission is over in minutes, as you mention.
- dredmorbius 5y agoAh, thanks for the clarification. It doesn't seem that transit-phase failure was a primary cause of incomplete Soviet Mars missions, though several did fail after systems (mostly electronics) malfunctioned during coast phase. Several failed in boost phase, or in leaving Earth orbit. Two of seven missues suffered from electronics degradation which either resulted in a total or partial failure to reach the Martian surface. Mars 2 & 3, both soft landers, failed for other reasons (navigation, and perhaps Martian meterological conditions), though both arrived at the surface. Mars 2 perhaps rather faster than desired. Mars 4 & 6 both seem to have suffered transit-stage electronics failures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_program
- boulos 5y agoAs I said a few months ago [1], it's mostly too bad Don has moved to Twitter. Maybe someone posted this from his recent thread at [2]? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26206335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26206335 [2] https://mobile.twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1410710988710572032 https://mobile.twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1410710988...
- boulos 5y agoOoh, and another interesting update on his book from a week ago or so: https://mobile.twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1406751034928627712 https://mobile.twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1406751034...
- dang 5y agoOne past thread plus a couple bits: Photos of the Surface of Venus (1975) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188247 - Feb 2021 (2 comments) Soviet Venus Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016529 - Jan 2020 (1 comment) Soviet Venus Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360763 - Aug 2012 (51 comments)
- justshowpost 5y ago> 2004 Hacker Olds By the way, these probes provided the data for the following: Harry Dale Huffman [1,2] discovered that at Earthly tropospheric pressure (sea level 1000mBar to 200mBar at the top of the troposphere), the temperature gradients of Earth and Venus are identical as shown by this graph (Earth blue, Venus purple). Horizontally the tropospheric pressure from the surface up, and vertically the temperature, corrected by 1.176 because Venus is closer to the sun [1]. So an atmosphere with almost 100% CO2 behaves identically to one with almost 0%!!! Likewise, an atmosphere without any water vapour (Venus) behaves like one half saturated in it (Earth). http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-gree...
- ixtal 5y agoI remember I was 3 years old when my mom, which worked a radio engineer in USSR Mission Control Center in Korolev, brought me the copies of the photos from Venera-13/14.