

Soviet Space Image Catalog - benbreen
http://mentallandscape.com/C_Catalog.htm

======
benbreen
Here's a 2006 news story about Don Mitchell's processing of data from old
Soviet Venus missions. Amazing stuff.

"Mitchell obtained the original data from the two landers with the help of the
designer of the Venera cameras, Yuri Gektin.... By calibrating a new camera
function, Mitchell was able to tease out many of the very dark and very light
regions caught by Venera cameras — details not brought out in the original
Russian photo reduction work. This process revealed, at least in the case of
Venera-13, hazily seen distant hills."

[http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14786868/ns/technology_and_science...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14786868/ns/technology_and_science-
space/t/soviet-era-venus-images-get-new-life/#.VPCFVFPF_jZ)

~~~
ljf
Sorry, fat finger accidentally down voted, meant to up vote! Great piece of
information, fascinating that such information is still there to be teased
out!

------
FreakyT
I love the Venus photos that the Soviet landers managed to take. Sure, they're
terrible quality, but they're currently the only images we have from Venus.

I wonder if, with more modern technology, it would be possible to design a
Venus lander that could last longer than the short period that the Venera
landers did.

~~~
Shivetya
Likely they could, but consider instead doing a Venus Orbiter similar to the
Mars orbiter. With some technology behind he perhaps it could deploy kite/sail
like probes that slowly dip their way through the atmosphere.

We probably don't go back simply because the environment is so hostile the
idea of landing man there is not possible and hence we concentrate on Mars
which holds other allure aswell

~~~
TeMPOraL
There is an idea of deploying floating habitats on Venus - apparently an air-
filled balloon would float above the hostile layers of gases, and you could
still extract some unseful materials from the atmosphere itself. I hope
they'll at least try sending a long-duration unmanned airship there.

------
michael_h
I've looked at those photos of Venus probably a thousand times. Still, every
time I come across them I just stare at them thinking, over and over again,
"This photo is from another planet. In space." Followed quickly by "Oh man,
we're also floating in space" and then reassuring myself that gravity is doing
it's job and we're not going to float away and we're pretty well stuck to the
sun. Crisis averted.

~~~
jschwartzi
I usually add "Wow, underneath all that crushing atmosphere Venus doesn't look
that different from Earth."

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm in no way a conspiracy theoirst wrt. space exploration, but a follow-up
question popped to my mind immediately: those pictures are so Earth-like that
how do we know they were made on Venus?

(I assume there was a way for the global scientific community to independently
verify that this data indeed came from space)

~~~
agumonkey
The latest Mars expedition did gave us quite detailed video of the landing. I
thought that maybe they have videos of the whole trip across space, even in
crude low res. form.

------
keslag
Just an FYI, The 4 images are links to the galleries they represent. It took
me a second at first to realize that.

------
vasticles
Amazing. My grandpa was one of the leading architects for some of this work
(mostly lunar probes out of all the ones listed there). It is pretty
spectacular to see what people managed to achieve back in those times. Wish I
got to meet him. Thanks for posting this.

------
Luc
It just so happens that the Russians launched a military imaging satellite
into a polar orbit a few hours ago. Supposedly it's the first of a new
generation that does digital imaging and no longer uses film:

[http://sen.com/news/russia-launches-bars-m1-classified-
milit...](http://sen.com/news/russia-launches-bars-m1-classified-military-
satellite)

------
DonPMitchell
Here is the page I wrote in 2003, about the Soviet Exploration of Venus. You
can find links to the images that I processed.

~~~
DonPMitchell
[http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm](http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm)

------
nikital
_Returned-film camera systems were the highest quality Earth-imaging
technology until recent linear CCD cameras. In America, returned-film systems
were forbidden for civilian use_

I tied to find information about these "returned-film" cameras but my Google-
fu failed me. Does anyone know anything about it?

BTW, information about the other type of cameras, CCD:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-
coupled_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device)

~~~
NickNameNick
I think they mean satellites where the film canister is physically returned to
earth.

See paragraph 7 of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)#Technology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_\(satellite\)#Technology)

------
dalek2point3
any idea what the soviet copyright policy is on these images? in the US NASA
images are always in the public domain ...

~~~
benbreen
My understanding is that copyright is null if it relates to a state that
doesn't exist anymore. I think it's almost always safe to assume that Soviet-
produced images are public domain.

~~~
ptaipale
I don't think that makes sense; in most other aspects, there's the concept of
a successor state. Russia took hold of international assets, commitments and
liabilities of Soviet Union. This included things like membership in the UN
Security Council, commitments to SALT, or NNPT (with the related commitments
to respecting Ukrainian sovereignty now quite clearly breached), the place in
the Ice Hockey World Cup A Series, ownership of embassy properties all over
the world, and whatever you can imagine.

I don't see why copyright to Venus pictures would be much different, if any
copyright was reserved in the first place.

~~~
soperj
I think this ( the place in the Ice Hockey World Cup A Series) went to the
unified team first?

~~~
ptaipale
I think you refer to the Olympics where there was the Unified Team (under
Olympic flag). I think the Commonwealth of Independent States played
friendlies only.

But I used wrong name for tournament: what I meant was the World Championships
(played every year), not the World Cup (a rare event, now planned for 2016).
There Russia was a successor to USSR after 1991.

