[HN Gopher] How the Soviets put a lander on Venus ___________________________________________________________________ How the Soviets put a lander on Venus Author : picture Score : 94 points Date : 2022-01-26 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (asianometry.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (asianometry.substack.com) | ArtWomb wrote: | Private sector Venus upper atmospheric bio-exploration is now | live. The game is afoot ;) | | https://www.inverse.com/innovation/rocket-lab-venus-explaine... | lstodd wrote: | What Venus needs is not another lander, but an aerostat with | syntethic aperture radar. All of this can be done in plain | silicon, no one's forcing anyone to descend into the hell. | | EDIT: or maybe forget the aerostat thing and just put a satellite | in orbit already. With a SAR. | Melatonic wrote: | Screw just an aerostat - lets get some giant floating cities | out there! | jbay808 wrote: | They did also deploy aerostats, although not with synthetic | aperture radar: | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program | Isamu wrote: | So Magellan? | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_(spacecraft) | ghaff wrote: | And there are apparently three new missions in the planning | stages. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/venus/overview/ | trulyrandom wrote: | I enjoyed reading this article, thanks for sharing it. It would | have been nice if the pictures that these probes took were also | included in the article. | intrepidhero wrote: | http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm has a neat set of | pictures, history, and altimeter data from the Soviet Venera | program. I find the pictures from the surface very eerie and awe- | inspiring. These seemingly boring, peaceful looking pictures of | rocky ground and clear sky come from a robot in a atmosphere of | super-critical CO2, at 460 C, having just descended through | clouds of sulfuric acid. Before this robot was melted, crushed, | blown away or dissolved into oblivion it took a moment to send us | a few pictures of the nearby landscape and tell us what color the | sky was. Well done, brave and lonely explorer! | dylan604 wrote: | So essentially, it's sunset/sunrise all day long. I don't think | I had never seen the spectrograph info presented here. | twelve40 wrote: | it probably corroded away... basically turning into a pile of | rust. titanium seems to be not very sulfuric-acid-resistant | Melatonic wrote: | I had a dream once that life started on Venus, multiplied like | crazy and fucked up the planet with overproduction of shitloads | of greenhouse gasses ending in the acidic madness that is present | today, and then jumping over to Earth. | | In retrospect this does not seem THAT insane and I really do | wonder why we have not focused more on Venus as a whole. It seems | to me that in the long term it might be easier to terraform a | planet like Venus than it is to terraform a planet like mars. | Stripping something away is often easier than building it from | scratch - and Venus has a whole lot of atmosphere on it! | | It could also just be that my brain finds the idea of T-Rex's | using their little tiny arms to operate computers and spaceships | on the journey from ancient Venus to Earth extra hilarious. | sprash wrote: | > In the long term it might be easier to terraform a planet | like Venus than it is to terraform a planet like mars. | | One day on Venus is 224.65 Earth days. You won't be able to | change that, even in the long term. | smm11 wrote: | This. | | We may have left a lander on the moon, but the Soviets put | cameras on Venus. Checkmate. | echelon wrote: | I'll raise you James Webb, OSIRIS-REx, Ingenuity, Curiosity, | Perseverance, New Horizons, Juno, Cassini, and the burgeoning | private space industry. | | Not that we're competing. (And if we are, this is the very best | kind.) | zardo wrote: | The Soviet Union has achieved very little since 1991. | BitwiseFool wrote: | The wit of this comment is underappreciated. | marcodiego wrote: | Soviet Union fans are probably very proud of Soyuz safety | record. | readthenotes1 wrote: | Nah. That's merely good work. | | STS-107-Space Shuttle Columbia, that's checkmate. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-26 23:00 UTC)