Venus Revisited

Astonishingly, this actually has space history in it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3387895.stm

"Computer researcher Don Mitchell used original digital data from two
Soviet Venera probes that landed in 1975. His reprocessed and
recalibrated images provide a much clearer view of the Venusian
surface..."

His page is at http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm ; the images
themselves seem to be ferreted away somewhere on a page that's 404ing,
but there's a good solid history of the Soviet (and the contemporary
American) program of Venus probes there. I've read parts of it, and
commend it to your attention...

--
-Andrew Gray

VERY nice surface images indeed!!


On 13 Jan 2004 17:13:00 GMT, Andrew Gray
wrote:

Astonishingly, this actually has space history in it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3387895.stm

"Computer researcher Don Mitchell used original digital data from two
Soviet Venera probes that landed in 1975. His reprocessed and
recalibrated images provide a much clearer view of the Venusian
surface..."

His page is at http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm ; the images
themselves seem to be ferreted away somewhere on a page that's 404ing,
but there's a good solid history of the Soviet (and the contemporary
American) program of Venus probes there. I've read parts of it, and
commend it to your attention...

--
remove 'ss' to reply!

Guy's Space Shuttle Payload Bay page:

http://www.netspace.net.au/~pargoo/

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:39:44 +1100, Guy Parry
wrote:

VERY nice surface images indeed!!


On 13 Jan 2004 17:13:00 GMT, Andrew Gray
wrote:

Astonishingly, this actually has space history in it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3387895.stm

"Computer researcher Don Mitchell used original digital data from two
Soviet Venera probes that landed in 1975. His reprocessed and
recalibrated images provide a much clearer view of the Venusian
surface..."

His page is at http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm ; the images
themselves seem to be ferreted away somewhere on a page that's 404ing,
but there's a good solid history of the Soviet (and the contemporary
American) program of Venus probes there. I've read parts of it, and
commend it to your attention...

I'm wondering if there's any plans for new probes to the surface of
Venus... with todays advancements in heat resistant alloys etc, a new
probe would be able to gather a magnitude more data, and hopefully for
a longer period of time (even a day/night cycle would be good)

Cheers,
Richard

In article ,
Richard Stewart wrote:
I'm wondering if there's any plans for new probes to the surface of
Venus...

Nothing much at the moment. It's still very difficult to operate for any
length of time on the surface -- keeping the electronics cold is the
biggest problem -- and that severely drives up the cost of doing anything
there, which makes it an unattractive target.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In message , Henry Spencer
writes
In article ,
Richard Stewart wrote:
I'm wondering if there's any plans for new probes to the surface of
Venus...

Nothing much at the moment. It's still very difficult to operate for any
length of time on the surface -- keeping the electronics cold is the
biggest problem -- and that severely drives up the cost of doing anything
there, which makes it an unattractive target.

Given that you don't need parachutes or airbags, would it be cost
effective to drop a whole pack of Beagles, at intervals of about three
weeks?
I can see that launch window problems mean you would have to do this
from an orbiting bus, which would add enormously to the cost.
--
Rabbit arithmetic - 1 plus 1 equals 10
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

In article ,
Jonathan Silverlight wrote:
Nothing much at the moment. It's still very difficult to operate for any
length of time on the surface -- keeping the electronics cold is the
biggest problem -- and that severely drives up the cost of doing anything
there, which makes it an unattractive target.

Given that you don't need parachutes or airbags, would it be cost
effective to drop a whole pack of Beagles, at intervals of about three
weeks?

I think it would be difficult to make that work well. With each one,
you're starting from scratch with new hardware and a new location. And
something simple like Beagle will have a surface life measured in minutes;
if you want even a few days, the design gets much harder.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

Henry Spencer wrote:

Nothing much at the moment. It's still very difficult to operate for any
length of time on the surface -- keeping the electronics cold is the
biggest problem -- and that severely drives up the cost of doing anything
there, which makes it an unattractive target.

Note, however, that NASA is, among other concepts, soliciting proposals
for a Venus In-Situ Explorer (VISE) under the recently released
Announcement of Opportunity for the New Frontiers Program 2003 and
Missions of Opportunity.

http://research.hq.nasa.gov/code_s/n...ain.html#2.1.2

I know of at least one VISE-type proposal in preparation and have heard
rumors of another.

--


Alex R. Blackwell
University of Hawaii

Richard Stewart wrote:
I'm wondering if there's any plans for new probes to the surface
of Venus...

Henry Spencer wrote:
Nothing much at the moment. It's still very difficult to operate
for any length of time on the surface -- keeping the electronics
cold is the biggest problem ...

Would it be possible to design electronics which work at Venus surface
temperatures? Using diamond semiconductors, perhaps? Or maybe vacuum
tubes?

At least there's not much day-night temperature fluctuation, unlike
on Mars.
--
Keith F. Lynch - - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me
HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.

In article ,
Keith F. Lynch wrote:
Would it be possible to design electronics which work at Venus surface
temperatures? Using diamond semiconductors, perhaps? Or maybe vacuum
tubes?

Certainly possible in principle, but quite a challenge in practice. The
plausible technologies are poorly developed.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In article , Richard Stewart wrote:

I'm wondering if there's any plans for new probes to the surface of
Venus... with todays advancements in heat resistant alloys etc, a new
probe would be able to gather a magnitude more data, and hopefully for
a longer period of time (even a day/night cycle would be good)

http://www.msss.com/venus/vgnp/vgnp.txt.html is a discussion from (I
think) about 1992, about building a long-lived Venus lander for
investigating seismology; it was costed to fit in the Discovery program,
but intended as a proof-of-concept precursor to a series of similar
landers to put a "network" in place.

(A contemporary Venus equivalent to Mars Pathfinder?)

It was rejected, but there were two probes to Venus which were finalists
at the same time, as the estimable Bill Higgins tells us:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...fnalf.fnal.gov

(The proposal to put six ground beacons and six floating ones on Venus
is a concept that does seem to have interesting potential...)

BTW, it's kind of interesting to look at the press release he quotes:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...jpl.nasa.go v

If I read it right, the projects which would become Stardust, Deep
Impact, Mars Polar Lander, and MESSENGER can all be noted there...

--
-Andrew Gray