Liam O'Mara IV, PhDMar 5
The #Venera14 lander touched down on #Venus in 1982 on #ThisDayInHistory, marking the latest #Soviet win in the exploration of Earth's sister world, and the last time a lander touched down on the surface of the scorched world. Venus deserves far more of our attention than #Mars.
Show threadPhil StookeDec 22

Well, the Veneras also measured wind, and Venera 14's site was less windy. Here is a paper by our old pal Leonid Ksanfomality:

Ksanfomaliti, L.V. et al., 1982. Microseisms at the VENERA-13 and VENERA-14 Landing Sites. Soviet Astronomy Letters, vol. 8, July-Aug. 1982, p. 241-242.

See it here:

https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1982SvAL....8..241K

But much longer-lived instruments will be needed. Sensors in the atmosphere (on balloons) are being looked at, they might detect seismic waves.
#venus #venera14

1982SvAL....8..241K Page 241

Show threadPhil StookeDec 22
These Venus landers did more than take pictures. The composition of the surface was measured: it resembled a low potassium basalt at Venera 14. V13 and V14 had seismometers. Typically you want to monitor for long periods to get good seismic data. V13 operated for 127 minutes, the record for Venus, and V14 only for an hour, so you would not expect very much. V13 detected nothing but V14 had two possible detections of motion. Where they caused by wind?
#venus #venera14
Show threadPhil StookeDec 21

This is the central part of the map at larger scale.

Venus #venera14

Show threadPhil StookeDec 21
As we saw with Venera 13, once we have that 360 degree panorama we can project it into something resembling a map geometry. I make no claims for accuracy, but I want to show what is possible, and others have done the same (but not, I think, out to the horizon). Here we see a pattern similar to the Venera 13 version with the lander at the centre. As I have said before, we don't know the orientation of the panoramas on the surface so my orientation is arbitrary.
#venus #venera14
Show threadPhil StookeDec 20
Here I have fitted the two Venera 14 panoramas together. The join isn't perfect - one join has a visible overlap but the two views from different cameras don't match perfectly. The other join is hidden by part of the lander. This is the best I can do. I have also stretched these vertically a bit to better match what I think the cylindrical geometry should look like. But many aspects of this reprojection geometry are speculative so don't trust me.
#venus #venera14
Show threadPhil StookeDec 19
Busy yesterday with my LPSC abstract - I'll post it here when I submit. Back to Venera 14: here are the two panoramas projected into a sort of cylindrical projection, making the horizons at each end horizontal. Look at the rock layers in the lower right: erosion has cut a hole through one layer to show another underneath. Those layers can only be a few cm thick - an inch if you prefer. could they be lava flows? They would have to be very low viscosity. maybe welded ash flows?
#venus #venera14
Show threadPhil StookeDec 15
The full set of images contains views through filters to produce colour images, taken one after the other and therefore taken at different times. Here I have cropped out a bit of the foreground in 3 views - greatly enlarged and so fuzzy. They differ a bit - soil particles are moving in the wind, especially between the top and middle images. They could be animated. There is a paper about this somewhere.
#venus #venera14
Show threadPhil StookeDec 15

The upper view from yesterday shows the arm which fell onto the surface to test surface hardness - we saw it with Venera 13 too - but here it fell on the camera cover and didn't tell us anything useful. But check the foreground of each view, the lander base ring with its teeth - designed to reduce turbulence during descent, I think. If you view this image:

http://mentallandscape.com/C_Venera14_1.jpg

you see the full set of Venera 14 images (sadly, very low resolution). They tell a story...
#venus #venera14

Show threadPhil StookeDec 14

What did Venera 14 see in this volcanic landscape? Again we will check in with Don Mitchell:

http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

- look half way down the page. Both cameras worked again, both provided some colour data (most of one pan, a bit of the other). My image is something I scanned in Moscow, showing map-projected versions of the central parts of the two panoramas, on opposite sides of the lander. These are presumably thin lava flows or cemented ash layers.
#venus #venera14