Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus

http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm

by djmdjm • 12 years ago

121 39 12 years ago

mentallandscape.com

arethuza2• 12 years ago

I had no idea there had been robotic balloons (aerobots) flying 54km up in the atmosphere of Venus!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon

Wingman4l7• 12 years ago

The only aerobots so far deployed on another planet, no less!

raverbashing• 12 years ago

To be fair, the air density of Venus is much better for that than, let's say, Mars

However, the Atmosphere composition makes it worse.

Roboprog• 12 years ago

Am I the only one who noticed the "works best with IE" notice at the bottom of the page? There's gotta be a "Soviet Russia" joke in there somewhere...

(kudos on the probe history, though, as the US has largely ignored Venus, Magellan not withstanding)

MentalLandscape2• 12 years ago

Haha. I just like the Calibri font. Maybe all browsers can use it now. Otherwise, the whole site is just very vanilla HTML typed into wordpad.

nroose• 12 years ago

That's a very venerable program.

dekhn• 12 years ago

personally I think the soviet exploration of venus is a great example of top-notch engineering combined with long-term executive support. I eagerly stared at the photos from venera (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps-faculty/space-history/venus) when I first saw them. They deployed an amazing amount of technology, continuously improved their designs, and ultimately collected real science data in a very demanding environment.

curtis3• 12 years ago

Back in the 60s NASA considered a plan for a manned flyby of Venus using Apollo-derived hardware.

I've wondered if a modern day manned flyby mission might make sense. A rover could be landed on Venus more easily than on Mars, but it would, by necessity, have a very short lifetime on the surface. Once it's out of coolant, the mission is over. So if you were going to land a rover (or rovers) on the surface of Venus, you'd need to maximize their effectiveness. One way to do this would be to teleoperate them in near real-time, which could be done if rover landing were coordinated with a manned flyby.

A manned flyby of Venus would be substantially cheaper and less risky than a manned mission to Mars. There's no manned landing component, and the flyby mission itself would take a little over a year, which is pushing the limit for human exposure to micogravity, but within the range that we have actual experience.

This kind of mission will, of course, only make sense if you are an advocate of manned space exploration in the first place.

lifeisstillgood3• 12 years ago

That has to be the coolest idea I have heard in a very very long time.

Absolutely no convincing long term value, but we just have to do it, just because we can. No asteroids to mine, no Mars bases to build, but "what happens if we go over there and look"

Gets my vote.

curtis3• 12 years ago

I wouldn't go so far as to say no long term value -- a fly-by would be good preparation for an asteroid mission or a Mars/Phobos orbital mission. In fact it might be possible to do the follow-on mission with the same ship.

NASA clearly needs an intermediate step between LEO and putting a man on Mars. Venus flyby plus teleoperated rovers is the easiest mission I can think of that might also be useful.

rdl• 12 years ago

Not requiring a landing means you could basically do it with what, 3 Falcon Heavy launches at most? So O($1-10b)?

keeperofdakeys• 12 years ago

There is still a problem we haven't solved - solar radiation. The ISS astronauts may have been up there for long periods of time, but they are protected by the earth's magnetic field. A trip to another planet doesn't have this solution. Even for the Apollo missions, we got lucky that no bad solar activity occurred, and that mission lasted eight days.

MentalLandscape2• 12 years ago

The Soviets also considered manned fly-by missions to Mars and Venus.

http://donpmitchell.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/heavy-interplan...

sssilver2• 12 years ago

One day I hope the humanity will credit the Soviet Union for what it really was -- a technocratic meritocracy, where scientific progress and enormous projects of planetary scale mattered more than daily preferences of spoiled individuals.

Hopefully one day such a society will emerge again, and this time they will not dismantle themselves over having Coke and Levi's. Having lived in USSR -- no, we seriously didn't break up because of human rights issues. We just simply wanted Coke and Levi's.

lafar6502• 12 years ago

Maybe it deserves credit for R&D and engineering talent, but certainly not for what USSR really was.

versale• 12 years ago

As born in the USSR I can confirm that the USSR was a much better place to live in than modern Russia from almost any point of view: the best education system, better and affordable healthcare, practically no crime (if to compare with modern Russia), books and movies of much better quality than the flood of post-modern shit we have now, zero unemployment rate etc...

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

a technocratic meritocracy

Unless you're Jewish.

sssilver2• 12 years ago

Arguments much?

vidarh• 12 years ago

Meritocracy? Really? Then explain Lysenko, for example, who single-handedly, thanks to his political clout with Stalin and Krushchev, set Soviet agriculture, genetics and biology research back several decades. For severall years, going against Lysenko's theories was actually illegal.

And you can feel free to arrange your own little Soviet state. For my part, my marxist views would most likely have gotten me sent to Siberia or worse, so I'd much rather stay clear.

rebolek• 12 years ago

When scientific progress mattered more, so why was cybernetics considered bourgeois pseudoscience? Also, how can you progress on planetary scale, when there's shortage of toilet paper?

_random_2• 12 years ago

It seems that USA has many kinds of treatments for cancer these days - a manifestation of recent scientific progress obviously. What is the typical way very poor people to get it (or lets say even a chemistry teacher, who obviously cannot be poor in a reasonable society)? (But toilet paper is obviously important as well).

InclinedPlane• 12 years ago

Are you fucking kidding me? Nearly as many people died due to Stalinism than did in the entirety of WWII. It was a horrorshow. A violent, oppressive regime that murdered millions and caused misery for millions more? Technocratic meritocracy? Bullshit. It was always about political favoritism. When smart people were in political favor maybe good shit got done, when dumb people were in political favor, well, shit got fucked. Lysenkoism is hardly a ringing endorsement for communism. Nor is the Venera program for that matter. Was it worth tens of millions butchered? Tens of millions enslaved under brutal conditions in labor camps? Tens of millions living lives of fear and hopelessness?

dang• 12 years ago

I know you were provoked by a trollish comment, but it should be obvious that this not an appropriate post for Hacker News.

All: this indignant political subthread is off topic.

qwerta• 12 years ago

There is a lot of interesting stuff in soviet space program.

For example the Vostok spacecraft (Gagarin) is still used on orbit 50 years latter for biological experiments.

_random_2• 12 years ago

Simple and reliable, just like T-34 and AK-47.

Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus

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