Venus surface images Options

[Hungry4info]

And here's the same from Venera 14 Camera 1, taking the three usable frames for this. It looks like there was a dramatic removal of dust between two of the frames that also perturbed the... debris thing(?) near the centre of the frame. There is only one usable frame from the Venera 14 Camera 2, so I will not attempt it on the other side. It doesn't look like any dust was kicked up anyway, being the famous "smooth slab" image.

Has this been noticed before? I did some googl'ing around and found Garvin 1981 and Greeley & Arvidson (1990) which talk about dust kicked up by the landers, but I didn't read anything on visual confirmation of dust being moved by wind.

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[rlorenz]

It looks like there was a dramatic removal of dust between two of the frames....
Has this been noticed before? I did some googl'ing .....I didn't read anything on visual confirmation of dust being moved by wind.

Of course it was noticed. But it is indeed perhaps not well known, and is quite remarkable, you would typically have to wait weeks or months to see such a change on Earth

As my review of Venus surface wind measurements notes "The probabilistic framework articulated in this paper supports
this contention of vigorous surface transport. Surface panoramas (e.g. Garvin et al., 1984) from the Venera landers show fine material
to be widely present. Of the 6 landers equipped with cameras, four returned images (the lens caps on Venera 11, 12 failed to
eject). Of these, only Venera 13 and 14 provided multiple panoramas which allowed change detection. Changes in the distribution
of surface particulates on the lander ring are seen in Venera 13 images (e.g. Selivanov et al., 1982; see also discussion in
Ksanfomality et al., 1983). Thus, out of only two occasions in which surface particle transport could possibly have been observed, it was
observed in one (with only about an hour between observations). Movement of surface particulates by wind has been observed on
many occasions on Mars, indeed (e.g. Lorenz and Zimbelman, 2014), but only after years of landed spacecraft operations (e.g.
Arvidson et al., 1983; Sullivan et al., 2005) and high-resolution orbital observations (e.g. Bridges et al., 2012).

The paper by the original imaging investigator is
Selivanov, A.S. et al., 1982. Evolution of the Venera 13 imagery. Sov. Astron. Lett. 8, 433–436.

[Marcin600]

...It looks like there was a dramatic removal of dust between two of the frames that also perturbed the... debris thing(?) near the centre of the frame...

Outstanding, Hungry4info!
This is the first time I can see any movement on the surface of Venus!
Really amazing - after so many years you can still discover something new in such old photos.

The gusts of wind had to be strong enough to blow away the dust/sand that was lying on the lander's aerodynamic ring (sand/dust that fell on the ring when the probe landed).


PS Do you have the option to use slightly larger pictures for these animations?

And what exactly is this "debris thing(?) near the centre of the frame" ? Damaged camera cover?

[Hungry4info]

PS Do you have the option to use slightly larger pictures for these animations?

I'm afraid not. Those are the highest-resolution images I have. I'm definitely interested in knowing if anyone else has larger raws though.

[Guest_alex_k_*]

There's significantly more images from the surface of Venus than just the ones contained there; the cameras on Venera 13 and 14 took several images each (even if from the same perspective). Maybe they were different colour filters, but there is some separation in time between the images, and the recent conversation about Venus' images encouraged me to see about putting some together into a sort of animation. In this case, I've taken the images from the Venera 13 Camera 1 and "animated" them after some (extraordinarily) crude alignment. I think I can see dust clearing off of the landing ring near the bottom-centre of the image. Edit: I've done the same with the images I have from Venera 13 Camera 2 and the dust motion is far, far more conclusively visible.

Not only dust but also small stones are moving.

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[Phil Stooke]

A reminder that the Venera images can be found here:

http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

- as well as a lot of useful information about the camera operations.

Phil