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Thanks, Cold War ...

8/3/2013

3 Comments

 

For the gaps in my knowledge.

It was only recently that I learned that, in 1984, the then Soviet Union landed a probe on VENUS and took pictures. Until now I've never seen these pictures of another planet which have been around for nearly thirty years. In the event that you as well have been somehow deprived of this information solely on the basis that it was mostly ignored as a fact their competitors didn't want to acknowledge, here's a shot of our next door neighbor closer to the sun:
Picture
From Wiki:
The Venera (Cyrillic: Венера) series probes were developed by the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1984 to gather data from Venus, Venera being the Russian name for Venus. As with some of the Soviet Union's other planetary probes, the later versions were launched in pairs with a second vehicle being launched soon after the first of the pair.

Ten probes from the Venera series successfully landed on Venus and transmitted data from the surface, including the two Vega program and Venera-Halley probes. In addition, thirteen Venera probes successfully transmitted data from the atmosphere of Venus.

Among the other results, probes of the series became the first man-made devices to enter the atmosphere of another planet (Venera 4 on October 18, 1967), to make a soft landing on another planet (Venera 7 on December 15, 1970), to return images from the planetary surface (Venera 9 on June 8, 1975), and to perform high-resolution radar mapping studies of Venus (Venera 15 on June 2, 1983). So, the entire series could be considered highly successful. Unfortunately the surface conditions on Venus are extreme, which meant that the probes only survived on the surface for a duration of 23 minutes (initial probes) up to about two hours (final probes).

Mind you, much of this happened before the moon landing.

The link to the Wiki article is HERE.


3 Comments
Bill S
8/7/2013 02:25:30 pm

This is gonna sound crazy, but back in 1993 (I think it was) I had the first really vivid dream I think I ever had, and it was so realistic that I actually wrote it down. I still have it in a notebook somewhere. The details aren't important here except to say that I met God in this dream (I was very agnostic at the time), and he took me back in time to an Earth that somehow existed before ours. We stood on a small mountain that was made of a jagged black material that was very much like shale rock. It basically looked just like the hilly surface of these photos. I had never seen anything in real life like the mountainside in my dream until just now. Weird.

Reply
Lee
8/8/2013 05:34:20 am

Wow. That's pretty amazing, especially since this is probably what the surface of Earth would have looked like for, oh, say, a few million years or so.

Reply
James Rozoff
10/21/2013 12:18:22 pm

Wow, it's amazing what you don't hear about.

Reply



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    L.S. Burton
    PictureFarewell, third person bio.




    Lee Burton doesn't have cats or kids, but he does have a lot of books, a couple of mugs he thinks are really fantastic, and a good pair of shoes which haven't fallen apart yet despite his best efforts to murder them with kilometers.

    Burton has written almost six books. Almost six as some are still scantily clad in their respective drawers. Each of them had their own goals and were written differently, and he is very fond of them all -- except perhaps for his first attempt at a novel, which remains a travesty.  That one he keeps locked in a dark basement and feeds it fish heads.

    In 2011, Burton won the Percy Janes Award for Best Unpublished First Novel in the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Competition for his novel Raw Flesh in the Rising.

    And just recently, in the fall of 2013, Burton published his first science-fiction novel, THIS LAND, about which he boasts constantly.

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