Venera 13 and 14
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Venera 13 and Venera 14 (Russian: Венера-13, Венера-14) were a pair of identical probes in the Soviet Venera program for the exploration of Venus.
Venera 13 and 14 were identical spacecraft built to take advantage of the 1981 Venus launch opportunity and launched 5 days apart, Venera 13 on 1981-10-30 at 06:04:00 UTC and Venera 14 on 1981-11-04 at 05:31:00 UTC, both with an on-orbit dry mass of 760 kg.
Each mission consisted of a bus and an attached descent craft. The descent craft/lander was a hermetically sealed pressure vessel, which contained most of the instrumentation and electronics, mounted on a ring-shaped landing platform and topped by an antenna. The design was similar to the earlier Venera 9–12 landers. It carried instruments to take chemical and isotopic measurements, monitor the spectrum of scattered sunlight, and record electric discharges during its descent phase through the Venusian atmosphere. The spacecraft utilized 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.
After launch and a four month cruise to Venus the descent vehicle separated from the bus and plunged into the Venus atmosphere, Venera 13 on March 1, 1982 and Venera 14 on March 5, 1982. After entering the atmosphere a parachute was deployed. At an altitude of about 50 km the parachute was released and simple airbraking was used the rest of the way to the surface.
Venera 14 landed at 13° 15′ S, 310° E. Venera 13 landed about 950 km northeast of Venera 14 at 7° 30′ S, 303° E, just east of the eastern extension of an elevated region known as Phoebe Regio. The area was composed of bedrock outcrops surrounded by dark, fine-grained soil. After landing an imaging panorama was started and a mechanical drilling arm reached to the surface and obtained a sample, which was deposited in a hermetically sealed chamber, maintained at 30 °C and a pressure of about 0.05 atmosphere (5 kPa). The composition of the sample determined by the X-ray fluorescence spectrometer put it in the class of weakly differentiated melanocratic alkaline gabbroids. The lander survived for 127 minutes (the planned design life was 32 minutes) in an environment with a temperature of 457 °C and a pressure of 84 Earth atmospheres (8.5 MPa). The descent vehicle transmitted data to the bus, which acted as a data relay as it flew by Venus.
Venera 14 landed about 950 km southwest of Venera 13 near the eastern flank of Phoebe Regio at 13° 15′ S by 310° E on a basaltic plain. The composition of its sample was determined by the X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, showing it to be similar to oceanic tholeiitic basalts. The lander survived for 57 minutes (the planned design life was 32 minutes) in an environment with a temperature of 465 °C and a pressure of 94 Earth atmospheres (9.5 MPa).
Venera 13 was the first probe to record sound on another world. The Huygens probe was the second.
Both landers had cameras to take pictures of the ground and spring-loaded arms to measure the compressibility of the soil. The quartz camera windows were covered by lens caps which popped off after descent. Venera 14, however, ended up measuring the compressibility of the lens cap, which landed right where the probe was to measure the soil.[1][2]
[edit] Fictional references
Venera 14 is visited by a Russian cosmonaut in BBC's Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets.
[edit] Image processing
American researcher Don P. Mitchell has processed the color images from Venera 13 and 14 using the raw original data.[3] The new images are based on a more accurate linearization of the original 9-bit logarithmic pixel encoding.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/gmis9907.htm
- ^ Images available at http://www.donaldedavis.com/2003NEW/NEWSTUFF/DDVENUS.html
- ^ The versions currently available on Mitchell's website
| Preceded by: Venera 12 |
Venera program | Succeeded by: Venera 15 and 16 |
| Flybys: Venera 1 · Mariner 2 · Zond 1 · Venera 2 · Mariner 5 · Mariner 10 · Venera 11 · Venera 12 · Galileo · Cassini-Huygens · MESSENGER | |
| Orbiters: Venera 9 · Venera 10 · Pioneer Venus Orbiter · Venera 15 · Venera 16 · Magellan probe · Venus Express | |
| Descent probes: Venera 3 · Venera 4 · Venera 5 · Venera 6 · Pioneer Venus Multiprobe | |
| Landers: Venera 7 · Venera 8 · Venera 9 · Venera 10 · Venera 11 · Venera 12 · Venera 13 · Venera 14 · Vega 1 · Vega 2 | |
| Balloon probes: Vega 1 · Vega 2 | |
| Future: PLANET-C · BepiColombo · Venera-D | |
| See also: Venus · Exploration of Venus | |
