What’s on the Surface of Venus? A History of the Venera Program
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- Опубліковано 13 жов 2024
- With so much attention on Mars, it's easy to forget there's a whole other Earth-sized planet nearby, worthy of exploration: Venus. And the Soviets worked really hard to tell us what it's like down on the surface of Venus with their Venera program.
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com
Karla Thompson - @karlaii
Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com
We’re always talking about Mars here on the Guide to Space. And with good reason. Mars is awesome, and there’s a fleet of spacecraft orbiting, probing and crawling around the surface of Mars.
The Red Planet is the focus of so much of our attention because it’s reasonably close and offers humanity a viable place for a second home. Well, not exactly viable, but with the right technology and techniques, we might be able to make a sustainable civilization there.
We have the surface of Mars mapped in great detail, and we know what it looks like from the surface.
But there’s another planet we need to keep in mind. Venus. It’s bigger, and closer than Mars. And sure, it’s a hellish deathscape that would kill you in moments if you ever set foot on it, but it’s still pretty interesting and mysterious to visit.
Would it surprise you to know that many spacecraft have actually made it down to the surface of Venus, and photographed the place from the ground? It was an amazing feat of Soviet engineering, and there are some new technologies in the works that might help us get back, and explore it longer.
Today, let’s talk about the Soviet Venera program. The first time humanity saw Venus from its surface.
Back in the 60s, in the height of the cold war, the Americans and the Soviets were racing to be the first to explore the Solar System. First satellite to orbit Earth (Soviets), first human to orbit Earth (Soviets), first flyby and landing on the Moon (Soviets), first flyby of Mars (Americans), first flyby of Venus (Americans), etc.
The Soviets set their sights on putting a lander down on the surface of Venus. But as we know, this planet has some unique challenges. Every place on the entire planet measures the same 462 degrees C (or 864 F).
Furthermore, the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is 90 times greater than Earth. Being down at the bottom of that column of atmosphere is the same as being beneath a kilometer of ocean on Earth. Remember those submarine movies where they dive too deep and get crushed like a soda can?
Finally, it rains sulphuric acid. I mean, that’s really irritating.
Needless to say, figuring this out took the Soviets a few tries.
Their first attempts to even flyby Venus was Venera 1, on February 4, 1961. But it failed to even escape Earth orbit. This was followed by Venera 2, launched on November 12, 1965, but it went off course just after launch.
Venera 3 blasted off on November 16, 1965, and was intended to land on the surface of Venus. The Soviets lost communication with the spacecraft, but it’s believed it did actually crashland on Venus. So I guess that was the first successful “landing” on Venus?
Before I continue, I’d like to talk a little bit about landing on planets. As we’ve discussed in the past, landing on Mars is really really hard. The atmosphere is thick enough that spacecraft will burn up if you aim directly for the surface, but it’s not thick enough to let you use parachutes to gently land on the surface.
Landing on the surface of Venus on the other hand, is super easy. The atmosphere is so thick that you can use parachutes no problem. If you can get on target and deploy a parachute capable of handling the terrible environment, your soft landing is pretty much assured. Surviving down there is another story, but we’ll get to that.
Venera 4 came next, launched on June 12, 1967. The Soviet scientists had few clues about what the surface of Venus was actually like. They didn’t know the atmospheric pressure, guessing it might be a little higher pressure than Earth, or maybe it was hundreds of times our pressure. It was tested with high temperatures, and brutal deceleration. They thought they’d built this thing plenty tough.
Venera 4 arrived at Venus on October 18, 1967, and tried to survive a landing. Temperatures on its heat shield were clocked at 11,000 C, and it experienced 300 Gs of deceleration.
The initial temperature 52 km was a nice 33C, but then as it descended down towards the surface, temperatures increased to 262 C. And then, they lost contact with the probe, killed dead by the horrible temperature.
Deep down, haven't we all been hurt by lens caps?
After recording this video, I threw them all out... just to be safe.
ME TOO. you should see all the great photo's i just took of me spelunking then! now if i could just remember to use the flash at night...
By the third lens cap failure, I'd be installing explosive bolts on the mechanism. Lens cover open? No? Deploy secondary lens cover remover!
OBVIOUSLY they found aliens and just didn't want to tell us. Just like the "failed" missions to mars.
YES, i'm being sarcastic.
@@frasercain I tihink we need an artificial Magnetosphere and a sun shield for terraform of Venus for make to reduce heat and to reduce atmospheric pressure on the planet
Do you think it is possible to terraform Venus using these two?
Fuckin lens caps gave the landers even more trouble than they give me!
They truly are a bane to all mankind. I've been trying to think of space-related projects for your channel, and you've already gone searching for meteorites, and space dust. We should think of some kind of collaboration some time.
It made me feel better about every picture of my thumb I ever took.
It's gonna be tricky, cause cody's experiments take some time and preparation. Maybe Fraser could dig up some hypothesis from his archive on terraforming, like hydroponics from minerals present in regolith. Also: Cody, didn't you participate in NASA's 3D printing challenge? Your knowledge about materials and foundry could be useful me thinks. Cheers both of you.
"23 minutes of robotic screaming."
Funniest thing I heard all day!
I'm glad you enjoyed that. :-)
That comment, along with the great and informative video has been very much enjoyed. Thankyou. :) ..........subscribed.
Robots have feelings too 😛
This had me laughing too.
ditto
Lens cap designer, you had_ ONE_ job!
One job! I'm sure that was a sore spot in the Russian Space Agency. Did you think about the lens caps? Seriously... the lens caps.
23 minutes of Robotic screaming....
"THE PAIN! THE HEAT! I'M MELTING! I WANT TO GO HOME!!!!.... I'm gonna die here aren't I?"
That's pretty much what it sounded like, I'm sure.
DocWolph Now imagine this in Russian :p
Now I'm gonna cry. :(
welcome to android hell
More like, 'It is getting wery hotski!'.
I am STILL amazed at the success of the Venera Program. To this day, I am just floored that they were able to do it.
TOTALLY agree. It actually went down into an incredible hostile place and took pictures. I can't wait for someone to go back and explore again.
dont forget mars 3 onto mars it was actually a succesfull landing, but venus what an environment
K Mac yet the Russian keep fucking up mars mission
K Mac literally accomplished nothing.
@@joshkusiak7613 The Soviets* sent the first picture from the surface of Mars. It was barely usable but it still counts...
* The majority of Soviets were NOT Russian.
So amazing! I was in Moscow Space Museum yesterday, there was a lecture by one of the engineers who worked on all Venera programs... and he personally knew Carl Sagan. He showed us many more images of Venus, I never seen before. Trying to get my hands on them right now.
I would love to see them, are they available online or were they just photographs. If you can get copies of them, please email me. Did you ask about the lens caps? :-)
I tried searching for them on then bet after the lecture but could not find any. There were few, with some sort of vegetation... looked like a flower and one with, what looked like a lizard type of creature. Strange thing about those images was - they moved from image to image as if a lizard was crawling a bit and flower-like things were moving in a wind... He had his USB stick with slides and images. I have contacted the guy, who was the host of the lecture, asking about if we can get those images. Lens caps failed to drop off because of the dust and other elements... He said, that bolts, that had to explode and shoot the caps off got stuck in some sort of goo because of all that dust and other particles in the atmosphere.. I will definitely update you on my findings. Just subbed to you after being Isaacs fan for a long time.
is there any update about the pics ?
rebelCoder (Юрий.Л.) lizards? what? lol
@@frasercain Don P. Mitchell restored the downlinked images from the original tapes. The pictures were far from grainy, only the western press showed 3rd and 4th generation copies, mostly to downplay the "communist" achievement. mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
Also, there weren't "color" and "black&white" cameras. The cameras where mechanically scanned single-pixel light sensors with a photomultiplier and a logarithmic amplifier. Every pixel was a scientific measurement. Color was achieved by flipping different color filters into the imaging path after the first full pass and doing partial passes to get a color image for part of the 180° view within the alotted lifetime of the probe.
the greatest enemies of the soviet union were lens caps
Yeah, the evil lens caps. I sure would have hated to be the lens cap designer for the Soviets.
@@frasercain Yeah. Whoever it was died of a 9×18mm brain hemorrhage!
@@frasercain Ironically, I remember somewhere reading that it was the director of the Venera missions that designed the lens caps himself, and he was leading the best scientists the USSR had to offer. That person conducted some of the most horrific experiments on robots ever recorded in human history.
On the other hand, if you ever need a lens cap that stays on no matter what, the russian space agency has some great designs.
Venusians know exactly how to sabotage this project, just dont let the lens cap off
Vega 1 and 2 used upgraded equipment from the Venera. Vega probes passed Venus to get on the right trajectory to intercept comet Halley. Vega 2's lander successfully landed on Venus in 1985 and lasted 56 hours. Also Vega 2 deployed a balloon that collected atmospheric data for several hours.
"Hey, Ivan, what's up? I thought this was the time for your engineering class?"
"Da, but I'm skipping today. Today the prof is just talking about lens cap engineering. What possible importance could that have?"
Ivan!!!
One of my favorite episodes. I had no idea about those lens cap issues. Love how the Soviets just stubbornly kept sending probe after probe after probe until it worked.
There were two more landers that landed on the night side of Venus, which were carried by the Vega 1 and 2 probes, along with two balloon probes that studied the atmosphere in the clouds. Because they landed on the night side, no cameras were carried, but they analyzed the surface rocks and studied the atmosphere. As the landers separated from their aeroshells, the balloon probes were ejected, deployed a parachute, then inflated their balloons.
The rover on Venus sounds exciting and interesting, but there are far more reasons to be hopeful about robotic landers on Titan and Europa among many other places that may contain liquid water and perhaps, primitive life.
Sergio Botero Id love to see Titan rovers. Rivers, lakes and methane "rain" falling like snow possibly. We dont know but since we can observe river channel from space, observe lakes from space and even waves. Well i dare say it would all be a beautiful alien site, unmatched in our solar system
They are too far away for presidents or their administrations to care enough to devote tax payer money to those sorts of endeavors.
Sorry.
Be happy we can do anything with the Moon in 4-8 years, let alone Mars, and don't hold out for anything else.
It takes 20-30 years of persistence to get any sorts of missions, from suggestions, to actual products that get strapped to rockets, and then 5-10 years for them to reach places beyond Mars.
That 5-10 years being greater than the 4-8 of an administration is a very serious hurdle when it comes down to the money spent. On top of that the negative press that comes from failed missions, vs the negative press that comes from just never even bother and just letting the space program slowly die, is so much greater, that it is more and more profitable for each new president to just reduce NASA's budget rather than to increase the safety or reliability of the rockets.
But I'm American and so I am biased and just think NASA is all that matters in terms of space exploration.
For the sake of the human race's future in space, I'm looking forward to the future where Chinese or Russian are the languages of the solar system, and English is just something primitives back on Earth, grunt to each other.
Here, I'll help you choose which language to learn.
Which do you find more aesthetically pleasing:
Я подчиняюсь. У ваших людей большая космическая программа, чем у моей старой страны, и я хочу помочь вам завладеть этой планетой.
or:
我投降。你的人民有比我的旧国家更大的空间计划，我想帮助你接管这个星球。
I agree that we should go to Titan, but why do we have to choose. In my imagination, we travel everywhere. :-)
Exactly, everywhere would be my choice but if we do have to choose, let it be Titan and via a rover design that is amphibious well can drive over land and sail over liquid methane :)
Venus is hotter than the average oven but just right for a pizza oven. I sense a business opportunity, Venus baked pizzas :-)
Not sure how you gonna achieve the "delivered in 30 minutes" promise most pizza places give you. And can i have mine without the "sulfuric acid" topping, thank you very much?
Did you ever smell sulfur? It does not smell tasty
And to this day, Russian-made cameras do not have lens-caps.
They learned their terrible terrible lesson.
Thanks for the reply. It's a real honor to hear from you :D
Welcome to lense cap hell!!!!!!
No kidding, I wonder what happened to those poor lens cap engineers. :-(
probably studying the sun with cameras (no damage to eyes, lense caps still on)
They used the original plastic cover. :-)
What happened to them? You really don't believe those are "volunteers" working and cleaning up at Chernobyl do you?
They should have designed it with CAPS LOCK.
Decades later, Russian scientists are still waking up screaming, dreaming of lens caps.
They know what they did...
Sending rovers and probes to other places is so amazing. We are lucky to live in a time where information is starting to come back to us and discoveries are being made. :)
Yup, it's an amazing time. :-)
Great video. I never realized they sent so many. I figured it was just a couple. I bet the lens cap guy got shipped off to Siberia.
No kidding. I didn't realize the lens cap disaster until I started researching the topic.
I'm assuming that they had to get a new lens cap team for every vehicle because each previous one was sent to Siberia.
Venus is closer. probably why.
No, they just stuffed him into the next Probe!
@@danielebrparish4271 And that is why they never learned.
please do more videos like this on the history of space exploration i think this was one of your best videos.
keep up the good work
Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it. We've been pushing for longer videos, more pictures/videos. More better. :-) It's good to know you all appreciate that direction.
Lens caps!
The scourge of all science.
Seems like the soviets had a lot of problems with lens caps.
Yeah, I didn't realize that going in, but it was clearly the theme of the episode.
It is interesting as to why they failed to deploy. They were designed with a small explosive charge, that build up pressure inside to push off the lens cap. However, in space a seal had formed around the edge, so the pressures could not equalize on the atmosphere and behind the lens cap. The result is hundreds of tons of pressure holding the lens cap closed, and a tiny explosive charge wont make a big difference in that (sadly).
@@tHaH4x0r Hey, thanks for this! I dove into the comments to look for discussion of WHY the lens caps kept failing, and my guess was it had to do with 93 atmospheres of pressure holding them on...
It feels a bit like the Ranger program. A 3 out of 9 success rate isn't all that great.
you made a single mistake by saying that no lander after venera 14, actually there're another 2 landers which was on vega program that also landed on venus.
I think this was one of the funniest videos of the last couple months.. hahahahah. Great job Fraser!
I'm glad you enjoyed it. :-)
best video on Venus I've ever seen. You are the man Fraser
Glad you enjoyed it. :-)
Great episode! Would have been interesting to add details about the cloud layers. I believe you may have in an earlier show? If memory serves...either way at 50 to 65km above the surface the cloud layer atmosphere and temperature is roughly that of earths, making it a cool place to hang out...if you could literally hang out there via some type of floating device like an airship :)
Yeah, we talked a bit about it in this episode: ua-cam.com/video/ALBMdY9-SZs/v-deo.html&index=12&list=PLbJ42wpShvml6Eg22WjWAR-6QUufHFh2v
At those pressures even submarines would float in the atmosphere:)
No mention of the Soviet Vega probes, with landers and balloons? The spacecraft moved onto Halley's Comet after dropping off their payloads on Venus.
I just wanted to cover the Venera program, which gave us the first images from the surface of Venus.
@@frasercain Fake scientist - wikipedia reader
Man.. you’ve powerful presentation skills ! Nice video.
Thanks for watching!
At this point, a Soviet-Japanese collaboration on camera lens caps would do humanity a huge favor.
Lens caps: a rocket scientist's greatest weakness.
We always suspected they were the weak link.
they should have just sent it without lens caps
wilson blauheuer they would probably be unusable then
Thank you for making an episode on the Venera program!
Thanks for watching. :-)
Wow, a very interesting episode. I learnt so much for this. Thank you for your very informative videos. I know space is hard but testing the compressability of your lens cap would surely make you cry!
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. :-) Yeah, that must have been heartbreaking.
"to confirm that it really truly...sucks"
hahaha made me laugh
Now you're edutained!
I want that high temperature circuitry for my PC and video cards. Put that space tech in my game tech.
Overclock with impunity.
This is superb! I will keep seeing this as a reference. The Venera program is fascinating to me!
Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I totally agree, one of the most fascinating missions ever.
And that's how the Soviets confirmed, for a fact, that women are not from Venus after all. Persistence pays off.
That's all they really wanted to know. And to corner the lens cap market.
Great video Fraser, I reallly enjoyed it.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot for watching, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
In Soviet's Venus, rover don't take picture, Venus takes pictures of you. ...
I am very excited by the thought of returning to Venus...This was a great video Fraser. It's such an amazing story. More Venus please!
Agreed, more Venus. There are some great stories in history like this, I'll dig them up for you in coming episodes.
Fraser Cain You're my favourite Canadian space guy.
Hi Fraser, how about a little translation on some of the data you mention on these videos. Had to stop the playback and calc 6.5m/s and 521 hours to get a feel for what these data really mean - about 31 mph and 3 weeks. I think giving data in everyday units gives most of us a better feel for the story you're trying to tell.
Thanks for another great video and I love these historical looks back.
Thanks Kenneth, m/s is a pretty common way to describe speed. Sometimes I'll remember to translate the metric into imperial, and sometimes I forget.
thanks for the most detailed info I've gotten yet on the Venus topic,I never knew that there were that many cafts that had ever made it there,with that many lens cap issues.
who would give this a dislike lol
The lens cap designers, obviously.
On a lesser degree, soil compression probe designer
Fantastic video! Thanks for posting. 👍
Thanks for watching!
"To confirm once and for all that it really truly does suck" hahahaa
That place really is the worst.
Those russians sure did send a lot of faulty lens caps to Venus.
Maybe they were trying to get rid of them?
They were Soviets and not Russians. Designing lens caps which would survive 90 atmospheres pressure and 800 degrees temperature and yet be removable was a real challenge.
@@robertbennett9949 Hate to break it to you: soviets were russians. Russian was lingua franca of Soviet Union (still used to this day in ex-soviet countries), the capital was in Moscow, soviet leaders spoke russian, whole west at that time referred to USSR as simply "Russia" (google some old magazines or newspapers, or ask your parents). After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, all foreign obligations including debt, etc, was inhereted by Russian Federation. Your fantasy world where "soviets" were an actual ethnicity never existed, i'm sorry.
@@robertbennett9949 In fact when Stalin trued to push for other soviet republics like Ukraine and Belarus to have a separate seat at the UN counsil, US president at that time (Truman, i think) replied: "In that case, every US state will have a separate representative too". And that story ended there.
You really did your research on this. Well done!
That line tho "23 minute's of robotic screamings" 😂😂🤣🤣
It seems so ridiculous they couldn't get a simple camera working.... Then I remember, ITS VENUS! They basically landed in an active volcano that's set in deep ocean. It's truly amazing.
Damn those lens caps
It's tricky making a lens cap able to handle those kinds of conditions.
Hi man !
I was just kidding in my comment
I know it was really difficult to remotely operate the Venera spacecrafts during that time and that too under such extreme pressure and temperature conditions of Venerian atmosphere
BTW, I really appreciate your channel for these cool space videos
Thanks for another great video!
Thanks for watching, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Despite the frustrating and darkly comedic errors, the Venera programme was utterly brilliant and showcased the capability of a determined Soviet scientific team.
They even managed to construct a chamber that perfectly simulated the conditions of the Venusian surface just to ensure they gave the probes half a chance to function in the wretched conditions. This was 1970s communist level technology. Just think of the cars they were pumping out at the time.
I'll never hear a bad word said about this extraordinary accomplishment.
Yup, easily my favorite series of missions. :-)
Imagine lens cap failure on the Titan probe... We'd have to wait so long for another one... btw, are there videos about Titan coming up?
I don't have plans for one, but I can put that in the list. :-)
The reason so many Venus probes had problems with the lens caps was most likely the high temperature and pressure that prevented them from deploying; Titan doesn't have that specific problem. But you are right that if something major goes wrong, it's a damn long wait for the next attempt.
Fantastic history! LOL.. “23 minutes of robotic screaming”
I'm sure it was horrifying to hear. The lens caps... they do nothing!
In my (English) view, sending back colour photographs from the surface of Venus is the single greatest achievement of space exploration.
Excellent and informative video. Many thanks.
My suggestion for a mission would be a simple lander with a single purpose, to take a gigapixel panorama of the landing site. 1-2 hours survival time should be enough to accomplish that and send back the data. Maybe a Google Venus Lander challenge :-)
But I think a lander or even rover should stick around and keep exploring. That would be ideal.
Wow, that was totally cool. Although I knew about many of the Venera landers, I hadn't considered how much work the Soviets had put into their program. They should take it up again!
And the best part was the pictures from the surface of Venus. 😀
I am upset because Frasier Cain doesn't have as many followers or views as other channels. And some of those other channels have straight up garbage!! Keep up the great work my brother. Huge fan.
Thanks a lot. If you want to help out, definitely subscribe and click the little notifications bell. Then watch our videos as quickly as we post them. That'll let UA-cam know our content is good for other users.
To think it's 2019 and they started exploring Venus in the 50's!! Though for all they knew if could have been a habitable earth-like world so I can see how there would have been a lot of motivation to explore and find out. Now we know it's hell so there isn't much motivation.
Some people thought Venus would hide a sort of Carboniferous type world with swamps and dinosaurs on it. Which would have been cool.
1:10 I actually cheered. Out loud : )
SPAAAACE. Hell yeah I'm excited to see more venus. This time with a really good camera that you can move. And no lens cap.
An aside - artists impressions = boooooooo. Can never tell if I am looking at painting, CGI or a real shot. Stop that, space artists : (
Venus is my favorite planet. So happy the Japanese are studying it. I would be totally stoked to see a new lander mission. Also can't wait for the day we go fossil digging on Mars and Venus.
Agreed, but we're going to need some special technology for that.
There was also the Vega program (Venus - Halley), 1984-1987.
Probes Vega-1 and Vega-2 in 1985 landed descent vehicles on Venus, as well as air probes that collected (and transmitted) information for 46 hours at an altitude of 55 km (34 miles).
After which the probes went to a rendezvous with Halley's comet.
Hi there Fraser, when are you gonna do a video about the difference between point singularities and ring singularities, and the difference between stellar non-rotating black holes and supermassive rotating black holes? Thank you
I'm not sure I will do a video specifically on these. Rotating black holes get pretty complex. :-)
Sure no worries (y)
Venera 7: "why! Why was I programmed to experience pain!?!?"
Oh, that would have been extra cruel.
I don't know why but I found this pretty funny 😂
5:44 someone is walking in the background!!! XD
Probably. We shoot on trails near my house, which sometimes backfires when people walk past, and we have to explain what we're doing.
...and next weeK: interview with Bigfoot
- the real reason he hides from the crazy hairless simians? light pollution!
Well, at least it wasn't a bear..
We've seen a bear coming back from a shoot, but we haven't had one actually wander through the shoot yet.
Yeti photo-bomb....
Obviously the Venusians have developed a special super glue just for the Earthlings lens caps!
Great video.
This guy is a great Presenter
Hey, what about the Vega program?
Question to Fraser: You have previously said that Mars is not you ideal starting place to discover space. But you would not become suicidal if they descided to focus on Mars in the near future?
It's not my favorite place to colonize. I think we should develop orbital colonies, but if someone wants to try to live on Mars, they've got my support.
Sounds good. I Concur with your chain of thought..
Awesome video Fraser! I had no idea the Soviets were so...obsessed with getting on Venus.. lol, good though as it seems we all benefited from the knowledge... When they were doing these landings, were they opening sharing the information with the US and the world? Or were they holding it to themselves and we found out later?
Thank you for the _Fahrenheit_, Fraser!
Nevermind. It was just the first one
I try to remember. Fahrenheit is the toughest one for me, because we have no concept of it in our normal thinking about temperature. Well, except for the oven.
@6:43 Cool! Venera-9 was launched the day I was born.
"to confirm that it really truly sucks" -- xD ..that's the attitude!
9:30 - uhm dont forget about the Pioneer Venus probes and the Soviet Vega program that landed in the 80s
Hey I have an oral in science about scientific discovery and advancement soon it must last 2 minutes and I would love to talk about the venera program! Do you have any ideas on what part I should talk about just to make sure I don't talk too much about history and I'm not out of the subject?
Btw I love your videos! Greeting from france
Thanks! Hopefully this video will help you. Good luck!
Fun fact, when they first accurately simulated Venus environment and put their probe for test the only thing remaining from craft were just lenses
In Soviet Russia, cameras lens you?
So cool. How are photographs transmitted over such massive distances? I've always wondered
The spacecraft have very powerful transmitters, and there are even bigger receivers here on Earth.
The Soviets would just not give up, they are persistent
In the USA we would have given up after the 2nd one, or waited 10 years till the next try
Space Missions require a lot of funding. Soviets were in competition with the americans,it was a matter of pride. Space race led to beautiful missions.
Venus is the closest planet to Earth, that probably played into how they could send so many
Dear Professor Cain
Are you able to find out any information on the fate of the doomed Soviet schmuck who was responsible for the operation/ automation of the cameras (specifically, the lens caps) on the Venera missions? I mean, I think we can all *guess* what happened to him, to his family, to his neighbours, to the people who recommended him for his job, to his superiors, and to his cat's uncle's family. But it would be nice to *know*
The Venera missions ran from '61 to '84, so that means he would have had to run the wrath of Khrushchev, Brezhnev AND Gorbachev (I think there was also 1 unremarkable, faceless minion between the last two). While I can see a certain laissez faire attitude projected by Khrushchev and Gorbachev, Brezhnev never struck me as the type to show mercy or spare lives, etc... I rather think he was the most Stalin-like G.S./ F.S. of the USSR since Stalin...
Still, if he lived through that, Yeltsin was a drunk and he would have lived through his term, too. But if this mystery man was still alive in 2,000, something tells me he would have found all his teas had a unique polonium flavour to them...
Soviet citizens: Where are the probes?
Soviet government: *Gone, reduced to atoms.*
They learned alot about heat and electronics when they built the blackbirds. Parts of the airplane got to Venus-like temperatures and they had to overcome this if they wanted them to survive for hours on end. I know its an airplane but if they can find some of those old engineers and learn from them they might have a good facet of information to put into the design.
The SR-71s are amazing aircraft, and the engineering that went into them is pretty mind bending. A lot of those engineers did continue working on spacecraft and various missions.
Damn those lens caps!
Crazy to see we almost made no progress in 30/40 years.
Yeah, it's too bad we stopped exploring the surface of Venus.
We sure need more funding!
Almost NO progress? We have put several probes and rovers on Mars, including The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the LRO, the Huygens probe that went to Saturn and landed on Titan, the New Horizons probe that took nine years travel to and photograph Pluto and it moons, put the Hubble Telescope in orbit, built the ISS and made a great many discoveries about our galaxy and our celestial neighbors and you say NO PROGRESS? Only a mental pygmy would make such a comment! Please STFU.
@@bobbarker7733 they were talking about Venus
HOT video! :)
Love space exploration :)
I would think after a couple of lens cap problems they might fix the problem or get a new lens cap designer lol
With the thick atmosphere, a good robot for Venus could be some sort of small propeller aircraft that could drop off while the lander is descending. It could fly around in slightly less hellish environments at higher elevations.
Yup, or fly up to cool down and then go down lower to investigate more.
Great video!
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Your channel is the best.
Poor Venus gets no love but has so much warmth to give.
They were Soviets and not Russians. Designing lens caps which would survive 90 atmospheres pressure and 800 degrees F temperature and yet be removable was a real challenge.
You can see that the lens caps were a really tricky part of the whole mission. I'm sure it'll plague future missions too.
love this channel!!
Thanks, and I love that you love it. Tell your friends. :-)
More excited about the possibility of cloud cities in the Venusian atmosphere.
It's a pretty cool idea. :-)
Would give my right arm to see the surface of Venus, Mercury, to see inside the atmosphere of any of the gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn, explore the oceans of the moons of either Saturn or Jupiter. The list goes on. I read that some Russian private contractor's were developing a device that could allow space craft to travel at least 1/4 the speed of light which would make it easier to travel to exoplanets that were reasonably close to our solar system and allow us to explore them in the future. Yes, I'm very excited about the potential of future space exploration.
Any methods of traveling faster would be awesome to see, but even with the constraints we have now, we can still explore huge chunks of the Solar System. We just need to make it a higher priority.
Yeah I agree. Faster Than Light travel needs to become a much higher priority!
How hard was it on Galileo and Cassini to fly by Venus? Especially given they were designed for the other temperature extreme.
A flyby is just a flyby, they didn't go inside the Venusian atmosphere. They just stole a little bit of its momentum , to gain extra speed for themselves. Well I guess it's a bit hotter being closer the sun, that's all.
Flying city on Venus!
and Rovers on land!
We're one step closer to those cloud cities we all deserve.
here is a question to answer for the crowds then: why would airships be a bad idea on Venus?
We can call the first one Hindenburg Jr. !
I still think the upper atmosphere of Venus is the most promising place in the solar system. Sunshine, ~0°C and suitable air pressure? Sounds perfect!
I think floating around on a balloon, looking down at haze would get pretty boring after a while. Nice for a vacation, but I wouldn't want to stay there.
Listening to the Soviet ‘recordings’ of the sounds outside the landers is eerie to listen to. I think about what would be entailed in putting a person on the surface. Unfortunately we didn’t have the technology in construction materials to make something that’ll withstand the atmosphere and pressure. Poor astronaut would be crushed like a can and his remains burned beyond recognition I think
You would think that the Soviet Union would have someone better at lens caps then the guy who brought them the cement bicycle.
Very interesting! Is there any plan for future missions on Venus? Is it possible to change that so hostile environment in a reasonable way? maybe bacteria?
Here's a video we did on terraforming Venus: ua-cam.com/video/n-kg0GbQkEk/v-deo.html
Thank you. I watched that episode but obscuring the sun, floating cities, dropping thousand asteroids doesn't sound to me a viable way of terraforming. It doesn't even have an "how"
We need to be working towards, a floating city on Venus, it has a high likelyhood of being able to be the largest, most cost effective, fastest to self-sufficiency and most comfortable (for human habitation) off world colony we could be developing. I would love a in depth, look at the the numbers on making this happen.