Sequiturs

There’s really only one place in the Solar System where the success of Soviet space exploration eclipsed that of NASA: Venus. Nobody else has yet landed an operational probe there on purpose (one NASA atmospheric probe punched all the way to the surface and returned data, but it wasn’t equipped to take advantage of such luck). The Soviets, meanwhile, returned data from not less than four landers.

Don Mitchell has applied modern image processing techniques to create a collection of processed images from these missions. It’s great work! You can get a feeling for the inhospitable surface. Here’s a composite panorama view:

Nice day for a stroll, if you like 700 K temperatures and enjoy picking out the cute animal shapes in sulfur clouds! Inhospitable as the surface is, Venus is easily overlooked as a destination for manned exploration. However, as Geoffrey Landis has pointed out, if you go a few tens of kilometers up in the sky, it’s actually a very promising place.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Science & Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.