Venera lander's soil drill?

(I posted this two weeks ago to s.s.tech, but it seems that it didn't went
through..)

I'm trying to find information on the Venera lander's soil drill.
(it's one of the reference instruments in my academic thesis project)

So far I've found some pretty good web pages, for example:
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venera11.htm
with this image:
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venera13j.jpg

However, no technical specifications seem to be available in the
Internet and in the literature that I've found. There is some information
in the NSSDC Master Catalog:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/...1981-110D&ex=8
But unfortunately the people mentioned in that page didn't have any
more information about the drill unit.

Does anyone have any technical information about this drill?

I would like to know some of these at least: the mass, power, drill time,
tests, price, depth limit, sampling system type etc. Understandably the
information about old Soviet experiments is hard to find...


Best regards,


Matti Anttila
--
http://masa.net/

"Matti Anttila" wrote...

I'm trying to find information on the Venera lander's soil drill.
(it's one of the reference instruments in my academic thesis project)

You will enjoy this reference, as it contains almost all of the information
you are looking for.

Barmin, I.V. and A.A. Shevchenko, 1983. The soil-scooping mechanism for the
Venera 13 and Venera 14 unmanned interplanetary spacecraft, Kosmicheskie
Issledovanie 21 (2), 171-175.

I can scan it and email it if KI is not one of your supported journals.

Regards;

-James Garry

Soft Matter/Astrobiology Group
Leiden Institute of Chemistry, Gorlaeus Laboratories
2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands.
Phone: +31 71 527 4237
Fax: +31 71 527 4397