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Photos from the Surface of Venus
Mean_Nishka writes "I was surprised to learn that the Soviets sucessfully landed a number of probes on the surface of Venus (the probes were given the name 'Venera') in the 70's and early 80's. NASA has a small collection of images from four of the missions. The images aren't much, but offer a stunning view of the surface of Venus. You can view surface photos at this NASA site. Space.com has a great summary of the Venera program here."
I thought everyone knew about these. It's almost like never hearing that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon. And hey! We've got Space Shuttles now! Or at least had them.
Everyone should know all they can about space exploration. Start at the beginning. Look up the list of early launches (back in the 1960's) to the moon, Venus, and Mars. Find the first closeup. photograph of Phobos ever taken. Learn what happened to the spacecraft. Investigate the technology behind the first photo of the backside of the moon. (a portable film development laboratory and a fax machine!!!). Marvel at the precision landing of a LEM near a Surveyor. Ooogle at the footage of a Ranger crashing into the Moon.
There's a lot of shit out there, and it's important enough that any geek should be ashamed to admit they'd never heard of Venera.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Venus fact sheet is here http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/ven usfact.html
When Russian speakers borrow foreign words, they usually keep the original gender (feminine in this case, despite the fact that the Latin nominative plural ends in -us which usually means masculine), and they usually take the root form of other cases rather than just the nominative singular ("Vener-" rather than "Venus"). In Russian, feminine nouns usually end in "-a" (or "-ya", which is a different letter). So to borrow the word Venus from Latin, Russian took the base form "Vener-" and tacked an "-a" on the end of it because it was feminine to make "Venera".
I believe genus/generis (pl. genera) is declined (has grammatical endings tacked on) in the same way as "Venus", so yes, if she were cloned there would be two Venera. (But in Russian Venera is the singular.) Penis is declined in a different way; the Latin plural would be penes.
Not that anybody's life is really improved by knowing this, of course. :-)
You assume the atmosphere is homogenous. Thermal differences between blocks of the atmosphere on Earth can produce refraction. It's how you get mirages.
It's also how you can sometimes "see" heat rising off objects. Warmed air rising off a hot object can have a perceptibly different index of refraction from the ambient air surrounding it. This produces optical distortion of objects viewed through the warmed air.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Basically, they had no idea how much light was reaching the surface. The probe wouldn't have lived long enough for manual gain control (it would have to take a picture, send it to Earth, the Russians would have to process it, adjust the gain, send the gain adjust command to the probe, repeat until a usable image comes back), so they gave the probe's on-board camera automatic gain control.
Once they got the image from the probe, they converted the raw logarithmic data into a more usable format. Then it was adjusted to be viewable by a human.