Surface of Planet Venus: March 1982 | Soviet Union's Venera 14 Robotic Lander
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If you could stand on Venus—what would you see? Pictured is the view from Venera 14, a robotic Soviet lander that parachuted and air-braked down through the thick Venusian atmosphere in March 1982. The desolate landscape it saw included flat rocks, vast empty terrain, and a featureless sky above Phoebe Regio near Venus' equator. On the lower left is the spacecraft's penetrometer used to make scientific measurements, while the light piece on the right is part of an ejected lens-cap. Enduring temperatures near 465 degrees Celsius and pressures 75 times that on Earth, the hardened Venera 14 lander lasted 57 minutes (its planned lifespan was 32 minutes). Telemetry was maintained by means of the Venera 14 bus in orbit that carried signals from the lander's uplink antenna and then on to Earth. Although data from Venera 14 was beamed across the inner Solar System over 40 years ago, digital processing and merging of Venera's unusual images continues even today. Recent analyses of infrared measurements taken by the European Space Agency's orbiting Venus Express spacecraft indicate that active volcanoes may currently exist on Venus.
Venera 14 landed at 13.25°S 310°E, about 950 kilometers (590 mi) southwest of Venera 13, near the eastern flank of Phoebe Regio on a basaltic plain.
After launch and following a four-month cruise to Venus, the descent vehicle separated from the bus and plunged into the Venusian atmosphere on March 5, 1982. A parachute deployed after the lander entered the atmosphere. The parachute released once the lander reached an altitude of about 50 kilometers (31 mi); simple air braking was used in the final descent.
The Venera 14 spacecraft was launched on November 4, 1981, at 05:31:00 UTC. Venera 14 was equipped with a gamma-ray spectrometer, UV grating monochromator, electron and proton spectrometers, gamma-ray burst detectors, solar wind plasma detectors, and two-frequency transmitters.
The Venera 14 descent lander was a hermetically sealed pressure vessel that contained most of the instrumentation and electronics. The lander was mounted on a ring-shaped landing platform and topped by an antenna. Designed similar to the earlier Venera 9–12 landers, Venera 14 carried instruments to take chemical and isotopic measurements, to monitor the spectrum of scattered sunlight, and to record electric discharges during its descent phase through the Venusian atmosphere. The spacecraft used a camera system, an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, a screw drill and surface sampler, a dynamic penetrometer, and a seismometer to conduct investigations on the surface.
Processing & Copyright: Donald Mitchell & Michael Carroll (used with permission)
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