Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
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Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
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Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#2I had no idea there had been robotic balloons (aerobots) flying 54km up in the atmosphere of Venus!
Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#3I 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
The only aerobots so far deployed on another planet, no less!
Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#4Am 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)
Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#5That's a very venerable program.
Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#6I 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
The only aerobots so far deployed on another planet, no less!
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.
Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#7personally 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.
Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only aerobots so far deployed on another planet, no less!
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.
relevant what-if
Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#9Back 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.
Re: Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
#10One 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.