Venera 14

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Venera 14

Venera 14 orbiter
Organization: URSS
Mission type: Flyby and Lander
Flyby date: March 5, 1982
Satellite of: Venus
Launch Date: 1981-11-04 at 05:31:00 UTC
Launch Vehicle: Proton Booster Plus Upper Stage and Escape Stages
NSSDC ID: 1981-110A
Mass: 760 kg
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Venera 14 (Russian: Венера-14) was a probe in the Soviet Venera program for the exploration of Venus.

Venera 14 was identical to the Venera 13 spacecraft and built to take advantage of the 1981 Venus launch opportunity and launched 5 days apart. It was launched on 1981-11-04 at 05:31:00 UTC and Venera 13 on 1981-10-30 at 06:04:00 UTC, both with an on-orbit dry mass of 760 kg.

Contents

[edit] Design

The Venera 14 lander was identical to Venera 13
The Venera 14 lander was identical to Venera 13

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.

List of lander experiments and instruments:

  • Accelerometer, Impact Analysis - Bison-M
  • Thermometers, Barometers - ITD
  • Spectrometer / Directional Photometer - IOAV-2
  • Ultraviolet Photometer
  • Mass Spectrometer - MKh-6411
  • Penetrometer / Soil Ohmmeter - Prop-V
  • Chemical Redox Indicator - Kontrast
  • 2 Color Telephotometer Cameras - TFZL-077
  • Gas Chromatograph - Sigma-2
  • Radio / Microphone / Seismometer - Groza-2
  • Nephelometer - MNV-78-2
  • Hydrometer - VM-3R
  • X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (Aerosol) - Bora-1
  • X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (Soil) - Arakhis-2
  • Soil Drilling Apparatus - GZU
  • Stabilized Oscillator / Doppler Radio


[edit] Landing

The Venusian surface as pictured by Venera 14 and remastered by Don P. Mitchell.
The Venusian surface as pictured by Venera 14 and remastered by Don P. Mitchell.

After launch and a four month cruise to Venus the descent vehicle separated from the bus and plunged into the Venusian atmosphere 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 13,25° S, 310° E (about 950 km southwest of Venera 13) near the eastern flank of Phoebe Regio on a basaltic plain.

The lander 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]

The composition of the surface samples 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).

[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. This representation is what the surface would look like in Earth sunlight, without the orange haze of Venus' thick atmosphere.

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/gmis9907.htm
  2. ^ Images available at http://www.donaldedavis.com/2003NEW/NEWSTUFF/DDVENUS.html
  3. ^ The versions currently available on Mitchell's website
Venera programme
Venera 13

1VA | Venera 1 | Sputnik 19 | Sputnik 20 | Sputnik 21 | Cosmos 21 | Venera 1964A | Venera 1964B | Cosmos 27 | Venera 2 | Venera 3 | Cosmos 96 | Venera 1965A | Venera 4 | Cosmos 167 | Venera 5 | Venera 6 | Venera 7 | Cosmos 359 | Venera 8 | Cosmos 482 | Venera 9 | Venera 10 | Venera 11 | Venera 12 | Venera 13 | Venera 14 | Venera 15 | Venera 16
v • d • e
Spacecraft missions to Venus
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 missions PLANET-C (2010) • BepiColombo • Venera-D (2013)
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