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Revitalizing Soviet Image Data From Venus
An anonymous reader writes "As everyone looks at Mars, a scientist has produced the best images ever obtained from the surface of a rather different planet - Venus. By using - and reprocessing - data from the Soviet Venera missions he got some really nice gems. To be found at BBC News Online and at mentallandscape.com. Nice images which resemble much that of the current Mars missions can be found here(1) and at here(2). By the way, did you know that Venus was more often targeted by space probes than Mars, including a number of ten (!) successful landers?"
What's it all about? Is it good or is it whack?
Venus lands you!
... and I'm looking forward to seeing the higher-res pictures that he says will be coming. But honestly, the main reason everyone is focusing on Mars right now is because there really doesn't seem to be that much to find on Venus. We know it's an acidic pressure cooker covered with bare rock; the odds of there ever having been any kind of life there that we could detect seem vanishingly small, and we're not going to be living there any time soon either. Mars seems potentially a lot more promising for both exploration and colonization.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What are the odds of a piece coming off, and having it still be so close? Must have fallen off right at landing.
Pictures like this give me warm feelings inside though. Images from a place so secluded, people can't get there right now. Almost any place on earth I can make my way to, but there, no matter how hard I try, i can't go there.
Pretty Pictures!
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit the sun, showing itself int the early morning hours -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where "Venus" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, "Venus" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, "Venus" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of "Venus" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to Venus", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "Venus" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Venus was more often targeted by space probes - because Women are from Venus and Men from Mars.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
didn't one of the russian venus probes fail dismally because the lensecap melted onto the lense?
getting images of venus from the view of a melted lensecap is quite clever. must have been a different probe...
i wonder though, why are we collecting such massive amounts of data with every new mission, when obviously it takes too much time to 1. process it 2. interpret it 3. draw conclusions. how much more interesting data has already been collected, but noone looked at it? (or looked at it the "right" way - seti@home comes to mind)
isnt there much more stuff worth of being looked at with "todays eyes"?
yeah, theyre always busy planning the next missions ;)
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
The engineering requirements were absolutely insane - 170g on re-entry, jetisoning parachutes - then falling free for 50 miles through the atmosphere to land without a parachute. And when it gets there:
Conditions were 90 atm pressure and 455 C (851 F).
This is also intriguing:
While never deployed, a seismometer and thermopile battery were developed and tested, capable of operating indefinately on the surface of Venus.
I'm amazed that "nothing can last long on the surface of venus" is a myth - there seems to be no technical reason that we couldn't have instruments there permanently. This page also talks of electronics capable of surviving the heat - and that the landers interior was cooled by liquid lithium down to 60 degrees C. Then they lost contact only because the *relay* satelites weren't in a permanent orbit - not because the probes failed.
I'm in awe of the engineering that went into making these probes so robust - and this was before I was even born! NASA needs to think a little more like this if they're not going to have accidents getting to the moon permanently.
But I thought the Venera probe crashed in Wyoming?
In Soviet Russia, image data from Venus revitalizes YOU.
I'd really like to see Venusian landers operating again. Venus is IMHO a much more interesting place than Mars, if only because we can't properly see it without actually going there. And yet it's so close (relatively speaking). Those few pictures that came from the Venera probes are soo tantalising, you just want to reach through, grab the camera and tilt it up.
Sure, it might be a very hostile environment, and not being able to get a good look at possible landing sites is a bit of a bugger, but I'm sure if the old Venera peoples were to use thier experience and modern materials & ideas that they could get a lander on the planet with better (and sustainable) capabilities.
There's no chance of recognisable life on Venus of course, but that doesn't mean there isn't life there at all - bacteria can be quite happy in extreme environments.
Mars is cool and all, but really.. rock, another rock, bit of red dust, rock, oh look a crater. Been there, done that, move on.
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It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
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In Soviet Russia, Venus revitalizes YOUR image!
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