[HN Gopher] How the Soviets put a lander on Venus
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-26 23:00 UTC)