Venera-13, Venera-14 Lander Images, Images generated from raw digital telemetry Options

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Here are images I generated from the 9-bit Venera-13 and Venera-14 data. Most of the work was spent combining three or four transmissions from the spacecraft, each with an independent set of digital noise. In some cases, scrambled regions of images were restored by recalculating the 10th parity bit, and shifting the bit stream. In particular, I resurrected a new section of the image on Venera-14 Camera II on the left side. I managed to distill out one very high quality copy of the full transmission from each of the four cameras.

Next, there is the problem of linearizing the camera response. The camera response curves published in Cosmic Research are wrong, or at least they do not extend into the darker range where a lot of the actual Venus imagery lies. You can prove they are wrong from the calibration wedges, viewed through the four different filters. Correct generation of true log response would result in wedge profiles that are exactly offset from one another. Some recent work on camera self-calibration in the computer-vision community points the way to reconstructing response curves, and when applied to the Venera images, the result is very pleasing. Round objects, like the elbow joint of the penetrometer, look round, not flat, details in shadows appears out of the blackness of the original Russian images, and some additional hills on the horizon appear out of the formerly white sky.

The full transmission consisted of several passes of the camera scanner, back and forth, across the scene. These four panoramas are combinations of up to five black-and-white images (clear filter), and a number of red, green, and blue-filter images. In Lab color coordinates, I extracted the ab channels from the red/green/blue images, and added them to the much higher quality B/W images. You can see that when making scans through the clear filter, the camera covered a wider area, the uncolored regions are just where the RGB data did not exist. Most of the blue images are black, due to a sudden drop-off in the camera response. There are probably a few areas near the bright horizon where the real RGB ratio can be extracted...a project for someone someday.

I've been too busy with my book and my company in Seattle to completely finish what I wanted to do. The color is still not correct on any Venera surface images. But the color filters in the camera were balanced with gray filters to be somewhat correct. I am awaiting one last key piece of data -- the spectral response of a color filter that was in front of the calibration wedge. With that in hand, an absolute color calibration would be possible.

Venear-13, Camera I (short program):



Venera-13, Camera II (long program):


Venera-14, Camera I:


Venera-14, Camera II:

[Rem31]

That are great images ,about of how it will look when you are standing on Venus. With 400+ degrees celsius of course and that is (less) funny.

[RNeuhaus]

That are great images ,about of how it will look when you are standing on Venus. With 400+ degrees celsius of course and that is (less) funny.

It is like to see how the cake is cooked! in the oven

Rodolfo

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Great images. Never seen before such oddies surfaces types. No much boulders, brokes stones, but just much laminated sedimentations of lavas?

Rodolfo

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Great images. Never seen before such oddies surfaces types. No much boulders, brokes stones, but just much laminated sedimentations of lavas?

At first, people thought they might be seeing sedimentary rock, but today it is believed the layering is volcanic ash and/or meteor-impact dust.

The Veneras are probably just sitting there today. They weren't made of anything that would melt or burn up, except some of the inside components. There doesn't seem to be much of any weathering on the surface.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

At first, people thought they might be seeing sedimentary rock, but today it is believed the layering is volcanic ash and/or meteor-impact dust.

Yep; Basilevsky has pointed out that the gamma-ray densitometers on Veneras 9 and 10 and the penetrometer on #13 -- instruments that I would have been willing to swear would be scientifically useless -- all indicate that the "rocks" are all rather low-density and slightly softer than standard volcanic rock. (#14's penetrometer, in that famous stroke of bad luck, landed squarely on one of the ejected camera covers.) Both these measurements and their visual appearance indicates that what we're actually looking at is flat sheets of ash or dust, fused together by a sintering process which also apparently explains the virtually total absence of aeolian soil movement on Venus -- one of Magellan's most astonishing discoveries, since even Venus' sluggish 1 meter/second surface breeze, in that super-thick air, should have pushed soil grains along pretty efficiently. (The only dune fields it saw on Venus were located near large craters -- apparently surface material blown along by the blast of air from the impact.)

One theory, backed up by lab tests, is that the reactive trace gases in Venus' lower atmosphere -- at the planet's high surface temperature -- have caused small amounts of calcite and other carbonates in the soil grains to fuse them together, so that Venus' surface soil is "crunchy".

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Yep; Basilevsky has pointed out that the gamma-ray densitometers on Veneras 9 and 10 and the penetrometer on #13 -- instruments that I would have been willing to swear would be scientifically useless -- all indicate that the "rocks" are all rather low-density and slightly softer than standard volcanic rock. (#14's penetrometer, in that famous stroke of bad luck, landed squarely on one of the ejected camera covers.) Both these measurements and their visual appearance indicates that what we're actually looking at is flat sheets of ash or dust, fused together by a sintering process which also apparently explains the virtually total absence of aeolian soil movement on Venus -- one of Magellan's most astonishing discoveries, since even Venus' sluggish 1 meter/second suface breeze, in that super-thick air, should have pushed soil grains along pretty efficiently. (The only dune fields it saw on Venus were located near large craters -- apparently surface material blown along by the blast of air from the impact.)

One theory, backed up by lab tests, is that the reactive trace gases in Venus' lower atmosphere -- at the planet's high surface temperature -- have caused small amounts of calcite and other carbonates in the soil grains to fuse them together, so that Venus' surface soil is "crunchy".

Yes, and in fact you can see the shadow of dust deposits downwind from some of the meteorite impacts.

It isn't completely clear that the penetrometer on Venera-14 failed. Basilevsky tells the story of it hitting the lens cap, but the scientists who ran the experiment say it touched the surface and returned some data:

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This post left me thinking about the horizon details visible on the "new" reprocessed images. So I joined both V13 panoramas on the places were they overlap. This gives us some degrees of horizon on 2 opposite directions. The interesting thing is that there is continuity on the horizon features over the missing space.

Very cool. Here is a perspective view from overhead, at the Venera-13 site. Notice the shadow all around the lander, as it blocks some of the uniform hemispherical light source.

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