[X] My Assistant

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Russia Plans "Long-Lived" Venus Probe

The press secretary of the Russian Federal Space Agency, Vyacheslav Davidenko, has said that Russia will design and launch a long-living probe to Venus by 2015. The probe is known as Venera-D.

Davidenko told a news briefing that within the federal Space budget for 2006-2015 was envisaged, “work to develop a principally new spacecraft, Venera D, intended for detailed studies of the atmosphere and surface of Venus”.

“It is expected that the craft with a long, more than one month period of active existence will land on the surface of the planet that is the nearest to the earth. Nobody has done such thing on Venus so far.”

Source: ITAR-TASS

[Waspie_Dwarf]

The Russian space program really needs some PR and marketing people.

And NASA and ESA don't? Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Venus Express are hardly inspiring names for spacecraft.

[mchan]

And NASA and ESA don't? Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Venus Express are hardly inspiring names for spacecraft.

Er, it may be an American thing, but Venera-D sounds like an abbreviated form of an old term for STD's. ElkGroveDan was polite to not put it so bluntly.

[dvandorn]

Er, it may be an American thing, but Venera-D sounds like an abbreviated form of an old term for STD's.  ElkGroveDan was polite to not put it so bluntly.

Reminds me of the big marketing disaster Chevrolet faced when they tried to sell the Nova in Spanish-speaking countries. In Spanish, of course, "va" is a form of the verb of action, roughly translated as "go." And "no" is a rather universal form of negation. So, "no-va" in Spanish is pidgin for "doesn't go."

And, of course, then there's the marketing of Coca-Cola in China, where the sound-alike ideographs first used to represent the brand name translated literally to "bite the wax tadpole."

-the other Doug