Slashdot Mirror
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."
At last I have hope that my lost car keys might show up in one of these photos. I've looked everywhere else for them.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Couldn't the Soviets have found a better place to mount their cameras? The pictures are awfuly obstructed, and the camera appears to be aimed at a bad angle.
Brings new meaning to 'disposible spacecraft'
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
Its like looking through gas fumes, lots of distortion. Add in the fact that its hot enough to melt lead and you have showers of sulfuric acid as well as a dense enough atmosphere to crush a man, its a wonder that with Soviet technology, they landed there and were able to get a few holiday snaps off!
Good thing these craft weren't designed to return. If they had brought back new diseases, we'd be in trouble...we'd have veneral disease.
*sigh*
It seemed to be a good pun before I submitted it...
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
... if you did, you'd remember how the Six Million Dollar Man kicked the venus Probe's ass!
Death Probe, part 1
Death Probe, part 2
The Death Probe!
Armstrong, Aldrin land on Moon
Kennedy beats Nixon by narrow margin
Allies land on Normandy beach -- D-Day has arrived!
AFAIK, the Soviet lunar probes did not start on a murderous Six Million Dollar Man-style rampage upon returning to earth.
The Soviets had much more success with their Venus probes than with their Mars probes. The reason is that Venus' atmosphere is so thick that a probe practically floats down like it is under water. The top of the probes had a hat-like thingy that acted like a small parachute.
On the flip-side, Mars landings are *still* difficult. It has enough gravity to require carefully timed decents, has wind gusts that can swing probes around, and sharp boulders, yet the atmosphere is not quite thick enough to make parachutes very effective. Mars ate up Soviet probes like Mars Bars, and a US probe also.
Table-ized A.I.
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. :-)
BEHEPA - Russian spelling of Venera, is the Russian word for Venus. I am sure this word is not indiginous to Russian language and most likely came from the Greeks. Venus is Latin. I don't think your analogy for genus/genera applies here.
You say Venus de Milo, I say Venera Milosskaya.
Paul.
I am wrong. I just looked up Venus through the English->Greek dictionary, and it came back as Afroditi. I guess Venera is the plural of Latin Venus, and not Greek as I have speculated.
Here is the dictionary link:
http://www.kypros.org/cgi-bin/lexicon
Paul.
why venus should be the focus of colonisation efforts, not mars
If you read the blurbs by the pitures about the missions, you'll notice that these landers all had very short lives when they landed on Venus. There are rumored to be, and my astronomy teacher claims to have seen, videos of the Soviets using language not "fit for print" as they watched their probe being eaten by the less then friendly atmospere (which contains noticible amounts of the multi-zillions dollar probe-eating compound sulfuric acid.)
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.
Automatic gain control:
The electronics in the camera automatically adjusted for brightness.
Logarithmic quantization:
The image data had to be digitized in order to be sent back, which requires quantization. But if you don't know ahead of time the brightness characteristics of the pictures you're taking, you don't know how subtle a difference in brightness the your digitization scheme should be able to handle, while still being able to capture the full range of brightnesses in the images. So when they digitized, which basically means that they made a table of integers and assigned a brightness value to each integer, the assignment scheme made each brightness value be some constant multiple K of the preceding value. In this way a brightness range of K^N, where N is the table size, can be captured in the digitization. This is opposed to a linear quantization scheme (like is used in digitized audio), where only a range of K*N can be represented.
Optical density:
Don't know what this means.
Linear radiance:
This is where they undid the logarithmic stuff to get numbers that their software was expecting, so they could massage their image data to get something suitable for human eyes.
Windowed sinc filter:
This is part of the massaging they had to do. It's hard to explain without going into some deeper concepts. It's basically what the smooth filter in Photoshop does.
Correcting the modulation transfer function:
I don't know. I'm an audio guy.
Gamma-corrected values:
Different displays show colors differently. The gamma value has to do with some curve that maps between brightness values and display brightness. Or something like that.
Gravity is insurmountable. It is directly related to the mass of the planet. While simulation of gravity by "centrifugal force" may be possible in space-craft it is not remotely practical for planet exploration and habitation. Most medical problems experienced by cosmonauts and astronauts are directly related to weak gravity conditions.
There are two types of planets in our solar systems, small rocky planets and gas giants. Bringing in Jupiter as an analogue to Venus is just plain silly
Solved in the short term by structures that are structurally engineered to resist extreme pressure and heat on the outside while maintaining liveable conditions on the inside. As I noted, the Earth's oceans constitute a valuable test environment for such structures, as does space itself.
Solved in the long term by climate engineering and terra-forming. This is more achievable than changing the mass of the planet.
Highly debatable. For evidence of life on Venus see the recent New Scientist story "Venus' Atmosphere Implies Life" discussed here on slashdot.
The puerile mindset of the poster demonstrated by this ad hominem attack immediately reduces the respect paid to any counter-argument the poster may choose to put up. I was highly reluctant to pay respect to such a comment by replying. I won't do so for any future replies from this poster.
It's not only latin neuter plurals that end in -a.
In all indo-european languages, the neuter nominative, vocative and accusative plurals end in -a. Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, German, Polish, Russian etc. It's one of those odd signs that show how closely related these seemingly disparate languages (and many of the people who speak them) really are.
(Of course many Indo-European languages lost the neuter gender anyway -- eg English, French, Persian -- so it doesn't apply to those)
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.