
Recovering telemetry data from Venera-13 and 14 - sohkamyung
https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1234658195668267010
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pixelpoet
Maybe interesting to others, he's the Mitchell in the popular Mitchell-
Netravali image resampling filters. Wikipedia only has an article in German
and Japanese it seems: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell-Netravali-
Filter](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell-Netravali-Filter)

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Tepix
Seeing the Venus surface images taken by the Venera 9 et al still blows me
away.

The US has a fantastic track record regarding Mars landings but the successful
Russion Venus landings are equally awe inspiring pieces of human engineering.

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m0zg
Venera missions just blow my mind, more so, even, than the Moon landings. Not
only did they land onto an incredibly inhospitable surface (and sent _digital_
pictures from there before digital cameras were invented), they also did
multi-stage missions where they'd first fly to Venus, and from there do a
Halley comet approach. Even today this would be pretty nuts to pull off, for
anyone.

~~~
tzfld
And for some reason they didn't succeed with Mars which has way softer
conditions.

~~~
wonnage
I've heard that Mars is tough because the gravity is high enough that you need
a lot of braking to land, but it's not quite high enough to maintain a thick
atmosphere, so you can't use drag (e.g parachutes) to help reduce work/weight.
Venus has a thick atmosphere and the Venera probes were able to use parachutes
to help land.

~~~
Sharlin
Well, you _can_ use parachutes, and indeed every lander mission to Mars has
done so, but they are not enough, necessitating complex EDL
(entry/descent/landing) sequences.

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jakeogh
Exceptionally cool. Here's a similar data recovery project from the Viking
Lander tapes:
[https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1](https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1)

~~~
z3t4
It still feels surreal to look at pictures from another planet.

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lokedhs
Is there any more information on this than a single message on Twitter?

Just like m0zg, the Venera missions are among my favourite ones, and I really
want to read more about this as well as seeing high res images.

~~~
jotm
There's plenty of articles and forum discussions in Russian, if you want to
use Translate I guess.

[http://galspace.spb.ru/index114.html](http://galspace.spb.ru/index114.html)

[https://habr.com/en/post/184444/](https://habr.com/en/post/184444/)

[https://www.roscosmos.ru/23286/](https://www.roscosmos.ru/23286/) (strangely
I can't access the website... I hope it's just down, not blocked)

~~~
anticodon
In the habr article there's this link to Don Mitchell's site:
[http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm](http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm)

~~~
jotm
I'll be honest, I didn't read it D:

But wow, that is one awesome site! Thank you!

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LawnGnome
There's also another Twitter thread that has the final, cleaned up panoramas:
[https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/12345820835126190...](https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1234582083512619008)

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dmix
Wikipedia link to the space program, this was from the 1981 and 1982:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera?oldformat=true#Venera_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera?oldformat=true#Venera_13_and_14)

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axguscbklp
Question: why has the US not attempted to land on Venus?

Another question: how long could a lander made with the best modern technology
survive on Venus?

Edit: oops! I just learned about Pioneer-Venus. Looks like the US has actually
landed on Venus. Guess I should do more research before posting.

~~~
ibrault
Not a lander but NASA has 2 potential Venus missions in their proposed
Discovery missions! [0]

In regards to why not a lander: I would guess it's because it's not really
necessary? Orbiters (like the proposed ones above) can gather all of the
science that's really necessary to study a planet like Venus. Landers are
useful to study more micro-scale science to, for example, search for life (see
the Mars rovers/landers and the proposed Europa lander). And orbiters are
significantly cheaper and easier to make. Landing on Mars is really really
really hard! I can assume it would only be harder on Venus.

[0] [https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-four-
possibl...](https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-four-possible-
missions-to-study-the-secrets-of-the-solar-system)

~~~
skykooler
Landing on Venus is actually fairly easy; the atmosphere is so thick that even
with a minimum of parachutes, a lander will touch down at a comfortably slow
velocity. The hard part is keeping it cool enough to function; all the Soviet
landers used a phase-change material to cool them, which worked for a little
while until it had all changed phase at which point they rapidly overheated.
Keeping a lander operating for more than a couple hours is a very difficult
engineering challenge for that reason.

~~~
ryandrake
> Landing on Venus is actually fairly easy; the atmosphere is so thick that
> even with a minimum of parachutes, a lander will touch down at a comfortably
> slow velocity.

Doesn’t the thick atmosphere also mean a lot more mass to slam into at orbital
speed when starting to enter it? Seems like it’s a double edged sword.

~~~
crubier
The upper layer of the atmosphere are not denser than the upper layer of the
earth atmosphere, so it does not make aerocapture more difficult. It’s just
that the atmosphere is “deeper”: going down, it starts thin, and then
gradually densifies until reaching earth conditions at around 50km, then you
keep going down in thicker and thicker atmosphere, which means you don’t need
big parachutes.

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xvilka
Should be put somewhere on archive.org I guess, along with many other similar
tapes.

~~~
jefurii
Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe

~~~
dr_zoidberg
Ah yes, the famous LOCKSS principle. Quite true. Probably contacting Jason
Scott[0] could set it on motion.

[0] @textfiles on twitter

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Qub3d
Tweet thread:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234658195668267010.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234658195668267010.html)

And followup, with full panoramas:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234582083512619008.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234582083512619008.html)

~~~
skykooler
Unfortunately the threadreader version does not load the images (at least in
Firefox), which makes it useless for an image-heavy tweet thread like this.

~~~
layoutIfNeeded
I had the same issue until I’ve disabled my adblocker.

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taf2
I still think a Venus colony would be super cool and maybe more viable than
mars given the available energy and gravity... this just seems so cool
[https://youtu.be/bcHkWKp9e4Y](https://youtu.be/bcHkWKp9e4Y)

A cloud city

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kjs3
5 vehicles, 4 (5?) crew transfers? Not to mention some "interesting"
environmental conditions. Yeah, it's definitely cool, but _wow_ would it be a
complicated mission.

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alexeyG
Fantastical job has done! Maybe there are other non-digitized materials from
any past missions, which could be digitized?

