That’s cool. I did not know that. So we have one blue planet, one yellow planet and one red planet. It amazes me that the planets in the solar system are so different.
Perhaps there is some sound analysis that can be to extract usual info from that audio track, but as far as my ears can tell it's just brown noise. It's like reading the output of a RNG that operated on the surface of Venus; it's hard to say you've learned anything about the planet. (I mean, you've learned the average sound level is above some threshold, but that was pretty obvious from the windspeed data!)
Was sitting here wondering that. Are some of those sounds from the lander? Sounds like lots of wind and some mechanical sounds - or perhaps metal being corroded by sulfuric acid and excruciating heat.
Great find! Of course, (as you say) other than uniform wind static you can basically only hear the sound of the drill and explosive bolts brought by the probe. Still, I was surprised to learn the windspeed at the surface is so slow.
It's disappointing that the NASA model of space exploration (few, expensive, long-lived complicated devices) means that we'll probably not get better pictures of the surface of Venus for quite a while. They just aren't going to fund a $500mm lander that lives for 4 hours.
If SpaceX had the money, I'm sure they would throw a lander a month at Venus, iterating on the longevity and quality. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. It’s not just about the cost, but about what science could be done. Much of the basic science has already been done by Venera, Mariner, Pioneer, and Magellan (Magellan providing a gravitational map of the entire surface of Venus). Here’s a list of the many missions to Venus [1]
So future missions not only need to justify costs, but actually overcome some pretty extraordinary engineering problems of doing science in such conditions.
If you look at Mars for instance, where conditions are placid by comparison, we still have failures. The Insight lander for instance failed to dig into the Martian surface due to underestimating the friction of the surface material.
So think of Mars as a learning tool for future space exploration.
Given that we're dozens of landers down on Mars — many of them modern — and we still have a ton to learn about the soil and history (ie, we are still landing science rovers there, as recently as this week), it doesn't really make sense to me that a few probes from the 80s have done all the on-the-ground science we want to do on Venus.
Even on earth we have still lots to learn about its geology, and 100% of our geologists live on its surface. It never stops. Each answered questions opens two new ones.
It’s not that we’ve done all the on ground science. It’s that we’ve done the simple stuff that you can do given the conditions. Staying longer and doing more complex science are harder engineering problems.
And I’m not saying it’s not worth it... it is. It’s just sometimes learning before you leap is valuable.
Let’s say we spend $3 billion on a Venus lander, and it survives 12 hours. Compare that to just the engineering knowledge that was gained from the Curiosity rovers for the same price operating for 5 years.
On top of which, humans stepping foot on another planet has incredible value in motivating all of humanity to do something greater. That’s certain to happen on Mars first.
Of course I’d love if we did it all together... but you all have to keep calling your Senators to make that happen. :)
> It’s not just about the cost, but about what science could be done
I'd argue that's not the issue either. We can keep a probe on Mars or in any orbit for years and gather data over that time. Anything that we land on Venus can only ever operate for a few minutes. Maybe there's stuff we could learn on Venus if we could stay there long term, but we can't. Any other target (Mars, Mercury, gas giant satellites, asteroids, dwarf planets ...) will have a better ROI, by several orders of magnitude.
Space isn't just about the basic science. We could advance engineering with projects like HAVOC [1] That could be indispensable if we ever need to use it on a more "interesting" planet.
There's not much you can iterate on Venus. It's a pressure cooker down there hot enough to melt lead. There's no way a probe can last more than a few minutes on the ground. With a huge investment, you could maybe double that, but in any case you're going to hit diminishing returns really fast. I'm not sure we would even know how to design a refrigeration system that would work at those temps, let alone how to power it, and I'm also pretty sure we don't know how to make anything electronic that works at those temps.
We are close to having microelectronics that can function at Venus surface temperature and pressure. Examples tested include smallish circuits like a 555 timer [1] or a 256 pixel sensor array [2]. The Silicon Carbide technology seems very capable.
SpaceX doesn't do self-funded science projects. I'm not really sure where you get that impression.
More to the point though, Venus is extremely inhospitable. On the surface the temperature is hundreds of degrees and the atmospheric pressure is equivalent to about 900m below the ocean on Earth. The solar flux at the surface is also too low for a lander to use solar panels.
So even if NASA or whomever wanted to spam Venus with landers, there's no real way to make them low cost as their main mission lifespan would be measured in hours at best.
Because of the surface pressure a lander would need to carry robust shielding for instruments and electronics. Because of the surface temperature the lander components will eventually overheat. Thicker shielding will delay the overheating but that eats into the lander mass budget for science payload.
Photovoltaics are out for power so the only options are chemical batteries or an RTG. An RTG isn't a realistic option since the environmental temperature is too high for it to cool and keep from melting.
Some sort of buoyant probe design isn't all that practical either. While upper parts of Venus' atmosphere are more hospitable than the surface, there's clouds of sulphuric acid and incredible winds to deal with. The density of the atmosphere is such that there's only a few kilometers of visibility so probe's floating in the lower density upper atmosphere wouldn't have any better ability to image the surface than orbiters.
So you're looking at Venus landers that look more like bathyspheres (no rovers) powered by chemical batteries. You're dropping them into an extremely high pressure furnace where they have a life expectancy of minutes to hours. I don't know how you'd expect to do such missions at a discount. Even if you somehow got the mission cost to a low tens on millions of dollars you're looking at ones of megabytes of scientific data for that price.
Space is hard and some parts of space are super hard. Funding is finite so getting the best scientific ROI is important. Littering Venus with steel spheres and parachutes for a few megabytes of data doesn't have nearly the return of a rover on Mars.
Most people in America didn't know about the Venera program, including me who was at the peak of my adolescent interest in "space stuff" at the time. I don't know whether to blame it on Russia's tendency not to publicize failed missions, or an American tendency to ignore or suppress news of successful Russian ones. So I just blame it generically on "Cold War bullshit" and figure I'm covered either way.
Not everyone at JPL knows about every single space mission anyone has ever launched. Not everyone at Apple has the OSX syscall table memorized. Not everyone at Exxon knows about every single oil field.
I don't think that's the right way to look at it. It's more like Apple OS developers not knowing about real-time operating systems or Exxon employees not knowing about off-shore drilling rigs.
There's stuff you should just know about if you're in a field even if you're not familiar with it or an expert in it.
In a sense, Mars is interesting just because it's boring. As in, compared to the other planets besides Earth it's perhaps the most benign environment for humans to possibly settle.
Settling Venus is also possible, but it's less accessible due to the Earth-like gravity well, and it's easier to imagine humans living relatively comfortably and self-sufficiently in a Martian Hobbit hole than on giant zeppelins in the atmosphere of Venus.
Venus is more mysterious simply because it's harder to see surface features under that atmosphere and the conditions on the surface are very strange and hard to imagine.
Sounds like I'm about your age. I remember Venera being in the news and discussed at school in physics class (teacher was a bit of a "space" enthusiast).
It definitely did not get the media attention that NASA missions got, but it seems likely that news of NASA missions didn't get much play in the USSR either. Cold war was still on, as you say.
You also could just have millions of people working directly or indirectly for the benefit of those programs. To beat the "enemies" to it. It was a golden age for space exploration.
Even this week there's definitely a lack of publication of the Soviet successes. As in articles giving a history of Mars landings and omitting the first landing, Mars3 from mention.
Wording i've seen. "USA is the only country to successfully land on Mars". "Chinas Tiawan-1 will make china the second country to successfully land on Mars." etc. The wording is subtle and arguably accurate but the omission is obvious.
The above is completely true. Whilst the Soviet Mars3 lander landed and it did transmit telemetry after landing its rover failed to deploy and since it was in a dust storm it didn't last long at all, it only lasted 20 seconds. So you can say limit your definition to exclude Mars3. Still if you're talking about the history of space missions to mars limiting the definition very precisely to exclude this is odd.
It's a bit like if the USA landed a probe on Venus tomorrow that happened to transmit for more than an hour and then running headlines "NASAs probe is the first probe to land on Venus and transmit for more than an hour". It's not at all wrong. But geez that's a very interesting way to define things so that you don't have to say 'second'.
Every faithful watcher of the Six Million Dollar Man series in 1977 and 1978 had at least some awareness of the Soviet Venus probe program. A two-part episode in 1977, and another two-parter in 1978 featured the so-called "Death Probe", a Soviet-made Venus probe which was (accidentally in 1977, and intentionally in 1978) unleashed on Earth instead, autonomously fulfilling its mission to "explore" its environs through various acts of violence and destruction supposedly suited for the hostile terrain of Venus. Because the probe was designed to operate on the surface of Venus, it was nearly indestructible.
It's kind of a silly premise, but this was the single most memorable antagonist for Steve Austin from my childhood viewing of the show. And...I don't remember how I knew this, or how much it was discussed in connection with the show, but I knew that there really were Soviet Venus surface probes that this story was (very loosely) based on.
Interesting. I remember reading about it in high school science book in my country in asia, so maybe we can rule out Russia's tendency to not publicize failed missions.
These are composites, not the actual photos, if I recall correctly. The perspective is shifted and I guess the horizon is just inferred from the corners?
I really liked this explanation of how the photos were transmit. I believe Don Mitchell was able to find the original data files for some of the transmissions and rebuild the photos in higher quality:
Semi-related: I don't know about this image in particular, but many images taken off-Earth have their white balance adjusted so they look the way they would under Earth lighting. I'm aware this is done frequently for images from Mars, where the images are adjusted so Geologists can compare Martian rock colors to those of their Earth experience.
If you enjoy Soviet space exploration and Venus in particular, follow Don Mitchell’s “archaeology” in the area. His old website [1] still has great things on it, but he’s since moved to Twitter unfortunately [2]. But at least posting this has let me see that Don is getting back into rendering (albeit I’m sure it’s for his space interests [3]).
32 cm band transmission to an orbiter as a relay[0]. The atmosphere of Venus is thick, but does not strongly absorb radio and microwave frequencies. Even the clouds on Venus really aren't all that thick.
Technically the Venera probe itself didn't melt. The solder in its electronics did. Higher temperature solder could have been used, but this would not have made a difference in the end because silicon stops behaving as a semiconductor past a certain temperature. Silicon carbide does not though and we're starting to make ICs that can function at Venusian temperatures. Even the venerable 555 timer/comparator has been made to function at Venusian temperatures[0].
There are diamond lenses [1]. They could be just the thing for Venus, which may have sulphuric acid rain. Diamond has no known equilibrium chemical reactivity below about 550 deg C.
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Is anybody aware of an approach to build a probe that can least much longer on Venus? The pressure can probably be handled but how do you handle the heat?
Batteries, wires, semiconductors, insulators that can work at 600°C are known. Magnets and with them electric motors are harder, neodymium magnets stop working, but you can still do with iron and cobalt magnets.
Generating power is also tricky, I have no idea how dark it is below the clouds, because all the photos are obviously adjusted to the dynamic range of displays. Possibly a nuclear-powered Stirling engine could just work, using some metal or salt with an appropriate boiling point.
You can cover the exterior metal parts of your craft with something like gold or platinum to protect against the acids.
This seems doable, but looks like much, much more work than a Mars lander which needs to operate in conditions similar to Antarctica, rather well studied and easily replicated.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadEdit: This video have tags for events in the audio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3Ife6iBdsU
If SpaceX had the money, I'm sure they would throw a lander a month at Venus, iterating on the longevity and quality. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.
So future missions not only need to justify costs, but actually overcome some pretty extraordinary engineering problems of doing science in such conditions.
If you look at Mars for instance, where conditions are placid by comparison, we still have failures. The Insight lander for instance failed to dig into the Martian surface due to underestimating the friction of the surface material.
So think of Mars as a learning tool for future space exploration.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Venus
And I’m not saying it’s not worth it... it is. It’s just sometimes learning before you leap is valuable.
Let’s say we spend $3 billion on a Venus lander, and it survives 12 hours. Compare that to just the engineering knowledge that was gained from the Curiosity rovers for the same price operating for 5 years.
On top of which, humans stepping foot on another planet has incredible value in motivating all of humanity to do something greater. That’s certain to happen on Mars first.
Of course I’d love if we did it all together... but you all have to keep calling your Senators to make that happen. :)
I'd argue that's not the issue either. We can keep a probe on Mars or in any orbit for years and gather data over that time. Anything that we land on Venus can only ever operate for a few minutes. Maybe there's stuff we could learn on Venus if we could stay there long term, but we can't. Any other target (Mars, Mercury, gas giant satellites, asteroids, dwarf planets ...) will have a better ROI, by several orders of magnitude.
Faint recollection, but I think at some point there were SiC semiconductors mentioned to try and survive longer.
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa...
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8782125/ [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8959229/
More to the point though, Venus is extremely inhospitable. On the surface the temperature is hundreds of degrees and the atmospheric pressure is equivalent to about 900m below the ocean on Earth. The solar flux at the surface is also too low for a lander to use solar panels.
So even if NASA or whomever wanted to spam Venus with landers, there's no real way to make them low cost as their main mission lifespan would be measured in hours at best.
Because of the surface pressure a lander would need to carry robust shielding for instruments and electronics. Because of the surface temperature the lander components will eventually overheat. Thicker shielding will delay the overheating but that eats into the lander mass budget for science payload.
Photovoltaics are out for power so the only options are chemical batteries or an RTG. An RTG isn't a realistic option since the environmental temperature is too high for it to cool and keep from melting.
Some sort of buoyant probe design isn't all that practical either. While upper parts of Venus' atmosphere are more hospitable than the surface, there's clouds of sulphuric acid and incredible winds to deal with. The density of the atmosphere is such that there's only a few kilometers of visibility so probe's floating in the lower density upper atmosphere wouldn't have any better ability to image the surface than orbiters.
So you're looking at Venus landers that look more like bathyspheres (no rovers) powered by chemical batteries. You're dropping them into an extremely high pressure furnace where they have a life expectancy of minutes to hours. I don't know how you'd expect to do such missions at a discount. Even if you somehow got the mission cost to a low tens on millions of dollars you're looking at ones of megabytes of scientific data for that price.
Space is hard and some parts of space are super hard. Funding is finite so getting the best scientific ROI is important. Littering Venus with steel spheres and parachutes for a few megabytes of data doesn't have nearly the return of a rover on Mars.
I like to bring up Venus whenever Mars is in the news. It's so much more interesting to me than the tiny, dark dust bowl we keep probing.
There's stuff you should just know about if you're in a field even if you're not familiar with it or an expert in it.
Settling Venus is also possible, but it's less accessible due to the Earth-like gravity well, and it's easier to imagine humans living relatively comfortably and self-sufficiently in a Martian Hobbit hole than on giant zeppelins in the atmosphere of Venus.
Venus is more mysterious simply because it's harder to see surface features under that atmosphere and the conditions on the surface are very strange and hard to imagine.
It definitely did not get the media attention that NASA missions got, but it seems likely that news of NASA missions didn't get much play in the USSR either. Cold war was still on, as you say.
1965: First landing on another planet (crash)
1967: First spacecraft to transmit data from another planet's atmosphere.
1970: First spacecraft to transmit data from another planet's surface.
It's amazing they did all this in the 60s and 70s.
The Cold War was great for tech investment and research without a clear profit motive.
Wording i've seen. "USA is the only country to successfully land on Mars". "Chinas Tiawan-1 will make china the second country to successfully land on Mars." etc. The wording is subtle and arguably accurate but the omission is obvious.
Here's an exact example of this i just read: "If successful, China will become the second country, after the US, to land and operate a rover on the Martian surface." Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22276153/china-reaches-ma...
The above is completely true. Whilst the Soviet Mars3 lander landed and it did transmit telemetry after landing its rover failed to deploy and since it was in a dust storm it didn't last long at all, it only lasted 20 seconds. So you can say limit your definition to exclude Mars3. Still if you're talking about the history of space missions to mars limiting the definition very precisely to exclude this is odd.
It's a bit like if the USA landed a probe on Venus tomorrow that happened to transmit for more than an hour and then running headlines "NASAs probe is the first probe to land on Venus and transmit for more than an hour". It's not at all wrong. But geez that's a very interesting way to define things so that you don't have to say 'second'.
> Walter: “Am I wrong?”
> The Dude: “... You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole.”
> Walter: “Okay then.”
It's kind of a silly premise, but this was the single most memorable antagonist for Steve Austin from my childhood viewing of the show. And...I don't remember how I knew this, or how much it was discussed in connection with the show, but I knew that there really were Soviet Venus surface probes that this story was (very loosely) based on.
So maybe it's a myth that it was ignored or suppressed?
I haven’t found great, high-res sources, but the real photos are on the Venera Smithsonian page here: https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/web12184-20116...
http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
[1] http://mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/donaldm38768041
[3] https://mobile.twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1362219784...
[0]http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/radioind/MVradio/MVradio.htm
https://iaaa.org/venera-9-on-venus/
The design of the lander is fascinating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_9
edit: An an artists impression of Venera 13 https://www.planetary.org/space-images/artists-impression-of...
[0]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8782125
Ha. Did you do that on purpose?
I swear I remember reading about "lenses made of diamonds" when I was a kid but I can't find anything now.
[1] http://ndtcompany.com/products/diamond_lenses/
Generating power is also tricky, I have no idea how dark it is below the clouds, because all the photos are obviously adjusted to the dynamic range of displays. Possibly a nuclear-powered Stirling engine could just work, using some metal or salt with an appropriate boiling point.
You can cover the exterior metal parts of your craft with something like gold or platinum to protect against the acids.
This seems doable, but looks like much, much more work than a Mars lander which needs to operate in conditions similar to Antarctica, rather well studied and easily replicated.