.

Obviously - the KSC website is the place to go for anything modern...a lot of modern spacecraft have a 'press day' before they fly and that's usually in a config that's near if not identical to the flight config.

I have some Beagle 2 pics from a book I have that I'll scan, as imagery of that isn't too thick on the ground.

Doug

.

Greg,
I have been collecting NASA photos since the early 1970s and have a large collection of original NASA-photos showing spacecraft being tested & assembled ... I'm in the proces of scanning all photos in high-resolution so I could offer a CD-ROM for those at UMSF who're interested... Price will just cover costs + shipping

Better than that, I'll burn my image collection to DVD and swap you! That way we both benefit... ...and if a few of us do the same, we could fill a few hard drives!

Bob Shaw

Bob, that would be a good idea ... My price for the double CD-ROM is just US $ 20.00 (worldwide shipping included) and all photos are in High-resolution (300 DPI) so these can be used for good quality prints or in articles...
I could even do an extra CD-ROM-set with launch-vehicles... Anyone interested, send me a message

Throw in some steak knives and we have a deal!
But maybe we can use the power of teh internets - would it be possible to do a Nostalgic Spacecraft Pic of the Day like APOD?

The image attached at the first post of this (interesting) topic is a typical example of a 'bad' photograph, although for the Soviet-Russian unmanned spacecraft, it's difficult to find something High-resolution other than TASS photos, which are mostly 'enhanced'
To prove my point about the difficulty to find High-resolution photos, just try to find a good color image of the Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft being assembled or being prepared for launch !
...

.

I've found these images of Voyager on the web:
http://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results...T,+USA,+VOYAGER

Post Scriptum: Try SEARCH-word "Unmanned spacecraft" ... High-resolution scans could be made

Doug, what's the limit on image size here for attachments? Didn't find the answer in the HELP topics, sorry ...
quote: If you upload an image file, it may be shown in the content of the post, all other file types will be linked to.

This is a great idea. Dave William's site at NSSDC has a lot of photos, and a few years ago I sent him a lot of Soviet spacecraft images, which are posted there now. Some, like the Sky & Telescope picture of the Venera-13 lander that you see there and everywhere is actaully a horrible model. I have a closer picture form another angle, and the thing looks like it was made from paper mache and aluminum foil. So it is a problem to find actual spacecrafts.

Mission Chronology

Phil, do you have some good photos of Pioneer-5? I'd love to find a nice copy of this photo:

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Philip:

The board seems to let you upload 1Mb in total. As posts in a thread are now aggregated, you can't just post another message at once with another picture - you have to wait a bit. But, fair enough - you can always post a link to an image hosting site.

Bob Shaw

1 meg. And a member has a total budget for all their messages. Attachment's are the actual limiting factor for hosting - we're nearly at the 1gb level as it is and purely for long term sustainability, I have to keep a tight rope on them.

Doug

Doug, I'm curious.
How much attachment total budget for each member? It is possible to know personal amount and remaining space?

If you go to 'my controls' top right, and then go to 'manage my attachments'
(I think a direct link would be http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...rCP&CODE=attach )

You can see it all there

Doug

Thanks, Doug!
So we can delete our attachments... at this point, what about max individual amount allowed? (if any)

It says what your limit is on that page.


Doug

O.K. I have 'scaled down' a nice Mariner I photo as an example

A good view, but the photo itself is oddly pixelated and jaggy. What is the source?

Ha Don ... the source is my personal collection of old NASA spacecraft photos ... I've scanned this photo as a 'colour' picture on my scanner which gave it a purple tone

Anyway... as we're searching the manufacturer of the Atlas-Agena shroud for Mariner 1964, I'm adding a photo of it here ...

Looks like you have a great collection of photos. Thanks for sharing some of them!

Well, since this is supposed to be a thread about posting genuine spacecraft photos, let's do that. Here are some first and second-generation Soviet Luna probes which I believe are actual or very close to actual:

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These probes were built by OKB-1, and the only really authentic displays are found in the Museum of the Cosmic Rocket Corporation now. They are often mislabeled though. The first image is the internals of Luna-1 (labeled as internals of Luna-3 which is incorrect). The two green boxes seen on the top are the NaI scintillator and its electronics unit, built by Vernov. The middle section is mostly silver-zinc batteries. The spherical container for one of the Soviet pennant balls is seen near the bottom.

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Next we see a photo of Luna-1 (bad models have obviouly fake instruments stuck on the outside, but these look real). The four stubby protrusions are Konstantin Gringauz' ion traps, which first discovered the solar wind. Note that on Luna-1, these traps are in a co-planar arrangement. The square device on the right side is a piezoelectric micrometeorite detector built by Tatiana Nazarova. She was the Soviet Union's expert on this topic.

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Again at RKK, a good model of Luna-2. Note that the ion traps are now in a tetrahedral arrangement. Gringauz saw the solar wind in the Luna-1 data, a uniform current in space, with the detector signals varying as the rotation of the probe carried them into and away from the solar wind. For Luna-2, he changed the arrangement of the traps to get a better check on that phenomenon. Variably-shielded geiger tubes, included by Vernov, are seen on the base of the magnetometer boom (top). The magnetometer, which first showed the Moon to have almost no field, was built by Dolginov.

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This is the only photo of the actual Luna-3 probe I have ever found. There are a few fairly good displays of the probe at RKK and Kaluga, but they have obviously-fake solar cells. Note tetrahedrally arranged ion traps again. At the top is the window for the camera and the photoelectric Moon finder. The four antennas at the top are meter-band transmitters for the phototelevsion signal (circular polarization). The two spools at the bottom are a long V-shaped short-wave band antenna for pulse-duration-modulated telemetry. Luna-3 used almost entirely transisterized electronics, which was quite cutting edge for 1959. It was also the first successful 3-axis stabilized spacecraft, for photography. During the cruise to the Moon and back, it was spin stabilized.

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The E-6 lander (Luna-4 to Luna-8) is on display at RKK. It is incorrectly labeled as Luna-9. The main difference was this probe was pressurized internally, and the panoramic camera extended a periscope inside the cylindrical window at the top.

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The E-6 bus, reconstructed from a Soviet documentary. Again, it was incorrectly identified as Luna-9. The major difference being the location of the airbag inflation tanks, on the ejecteable side unit (right).

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The E-6M lander was built by NPO Lavochkin, not OKB-1. A good display of it can be found at their museum. This lander was not pressurized, and a completely different camera was used (built by RNII KP), which operated in a vacuum environement and had much higher resolution than the E-6 camera.

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Luna-13 had two cameras (one of which failed) and some experiments that were deployed on the surface by cantalevered extensions. Also note, all Soviet spacecrafts were blanketed with "thermal vacuum shielding", layers of fiberglass and metal foil. The E-6 landers were cooled by water evaporation units in the base.

Great stuff; keep em coming! Thanks!

Don:

Great images! Do you reckon that all the shiny pictures are misleading, inasmuch as there's no thermal blanket? And I didn't know about the water evaporative cooling scheme - shades of Ranger-A! I still confess to a soft spot for balsa-wood Moon landers, though...

Bob Shaw

Not misleading, just typical of how everyone displays spacecrafts. NASA doesn't usually show its probes in museums all wrapped in mylar foil like a TV dinner. There are photos of the Soviet probes prepared for launch.

The Soviets had a surplus of rocket power, so their crafts were heavy and included a lot of systems that we consider a luxury today, like pressurized instrument compartments, and air-conditioning systems to control temperature. Internal spacecraft systems were a very unusual mix of solid-state, vacuum-tube and electro-mechanical technology, which probably generated a lot of heat.

Once something works, it is used for a long time, and not replace just because it is not "modern" enough. So you get technologies spanning decades. Even in the later Venera and Fobos probes, for example, the engine control computer was electro-mechanical. The thing looks like a Babbage difference engine! And in another part of the craft would be a Pilyugin BISER computer built from integrated circuits.

Babbage. Unless that was an editorial comment that went over my head.

Here are some of the third-generation Luna probes.

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Luna-16 and 20 were sample return missions. An attempt was made with Luna-15 to return a sample before Apollo 11 could, but it crash landed on the Moon.

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A drilling unit is lowered to the Moon's surface, bores a few inches into the surface and augers up some rock and soil. Two panoramic cameras view the site and help radio operators to position the drill. Then it comes up and deposits the sample in the small heat-shielded reentry pod at the top. The whole silver colored section, above the white torus, takes off and returns the pod to Earth.

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Luna-17 carried the Lunokhod ("Moon rover"), using the same base unit as Luna-16. The second picture is not a photo, but I thought it was a cool drawing of the Luna-17 and the Block-D escape stage that launches it from parking orbit to the Moon. The spherical and toroidal oxydizer and fuel tanks are classic bizarre Russian design esthetics.

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There are a lot of bad models of the Lunokhod out there. This appears to be a good photo of Lunokhod-1. The first rover opperated for almost one year and returned 200 panoramas from the surface. A radioisotope source kept it warm during the Lunar nights. It was radio opperated by a three-man crew in Simferopol, in the Crimea (and not by a dwarf inside the rover, as some skeptical Americans claimed).

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The last spacecraft to ever land on the Moon, Luna-24. I don't have a real photo of this, just this display at the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy. It is similar to Luna-16, but it has a much more complex sampling device which drilled a six-foot core and wound it up into a helical plastic tube. It is the only deep-core sample from the Moon that exists.

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Luna-19 and 22 were "heavy orbiters", based on a stripped down Lunokhod hull. They were used to study mass concentrations and improve the Soviet spherical-harmonic model of the Lunar gravitational field. They contained a linear camera that returned wide-angle panoramas. Both probes were maneuvered into extremely low "grazing" orbits.

Terrific album -- but, when it comes to deep cores, aren't you forgetting the three from Apollos 15 through 17? The Apollo 15 crew certainly wouldn't have: I will never forget listening to them spending something like a half-hour repeatedly groaning "One...two...THREE!" as they strained to pull the thing out of the ground. (During all this period, the camera on the rover -- whose vertical swivel clutch had started to jam -- kept slewing back and forth pointed downwards at the ground while the remote operator tried to get it pointed up to see the crew. He finally succeeded literally a couple of seconds before the end of the core tube finally popped out of the ground.) After that they provided a jack, which worked on Apollo 16 but broke on 17 -- but they also started running the drill backwards for a moment at the end of each drilling run, which broke it free so the 17 crew were able to pull it out fairly easily even without the jack.

Ever since then, I have been very skeptical of remote-control drilling operations on other worlds -- although the Soviets solved the problem neatly by just providing the entire drill bit with a separate internal lining which they pulled back up through the outer tube. But you can only do that once per bit...

I remembered it but always had the impression they were very shallow cores. But looking it up now, I see they the Apollo missions also drilled some there were more than 2 meters, at least as good as Luna-24.

Don:

The Block-D stage is a great example of Soviet engineering, and is yet another survivor into the modern era. One aspect which has always struck me as being brilliantly simple was their method of ensuring that all the fuel in the toroidal tank could be emptied in flight - they simply tilted the tank so that the 'bottom' was at one point rather than in a line all around the base. So simple, and so effective (and the reason why Block-D diagrams, or at least the good ones, always look sorta squint!).

Bob Shaw

Don, you must be confused between the deep cores retrieved by the Apollo crews using the lunar surface drill (whose primary mission was to emplace heat flow probes) and the shallower core tube samples collected using what were called "Hoover tubes." The shorter core tubes were attached to extension handles and pounded into the ground using geology hammers.

The small core tubes gathered cores ranging between 15 cm up to 60 to 70 cm, depending on the number of roughly 30-cm tubes used. A single core sample collected material up to about 25-30 cm (though the lunar ground compacts so quickly that many of the core sample attempts only collected 15 to 20 cm of material). Starting with Apollo 12, the crews screwed two Hoover tubes together to collect "double core" samples, and Apollo 14 attempted one "triple core" sample, screwing three different core tubes together. However, most of the material from this triple core attempt slid out of the tube as it was extracted from the ground.

Even on the J missions, these Hoover tubes were used at remote sampling locations. One very good sample set from Apollo 17 was a double core tube driven by Jack Schmitt on the rim of Shorty Crater, which gave a nice sampling of the change-with-depth of the volcanic glass material that was staining the surface soil orange. It was this core tube sample that allowed post-mission analysis to definitively identify the glasses as fire-fountain remnants, and the range of coloration over the depth of the glass deposit (from orange near the top, to deep red in the middle, to dark black at the bottom) connected this glassy deposit to the darkening material in the so-called dark mantling unit.

So, even these shallow core tube samples played a pivotal role in the human exploration of the Moon that was Apollo.

-the other Doug

Great photos Don, hadn't seen some of those before (probably Your personal ones) ... It's remains difficult to find good photos of Soviet-Russian era unmanned spacecraft ... You're right about the thermal blankets, a good example is to go to the NASA-KSC photo webpage and check the NewHorizons preparation from naked to completely 'packed' ...
Looking forward to another set of photos ...

Yeah, I watched all these on TV as they were happening, and I remember them pounding those in the ground and turning it and pulling it out. I remember the motorized core driller too, but I had no idea it drilled so deeply. Was there some kind of telescoping extension underground? I never saw anyone carrying around 2.5 meter tubes.

The Luna-24 drilling system was developed by Barman's bureau within the Ministry of General Machine Building. Barman was a first-rate engineer, who also designed the "site 1" launch pad in Baikonur. The soil drill for the Venera landers (also by Barman) was also a nice piece of work. Its electric motor and parts were designed to operate only after thermal expansion at 500 degrees C.

The Apollo deep cores were retrieved using segmented tubes. There was an initial "long tube" that was just under a meter long, and IIRC three extensions of about 30 to 40 cm each that were screwed onto the previous tube segment.

Because the suits were so stiff it was difficult to drill the tube completely into the ground, with the drill head going down to surface level, a total of about 2.5 meters of tube were provided, but the deepest core was just more than 2 meters deep.

There was one point at which you *did* see the crews carrying around a 2.5-meter tube, though -- when they extracted the cores from the ground. The whole tube, all four pieces, was pulled out of the ground and then unscrewed into its constituent segments. This provided some serious difficulty on Apollo 15, as well, and they ended up returning the long tube and the three extensions as two separate units, as opposed to breaking them all down into their individual segments. (And yes, these cores were returned in bags, exposed to the crew air environment, as opposed to being placed inside sealed vacuum containers. They wouldn't fit inside the SRCs.)

The heat flow probes were emplaced in a similar fashion, by attaching a succession of hollow tubes to the drill. However, the heat flow probes were simply placed directly into the hollow drill stems (which, for the heat flow holes, were *not* open at the pointy end). Thus there was never a question of the physical surroundings of the heat flow probe, and there was never the possibility of a drilled hole collapsing before the probe was inserted.

Interestingly, the way the drill was designed, you had to drill your heat flow holes first and *then* drill the deep core sample. The heat flow drill stems attached to the drill slightly differently than the sample tubes, to allow for the pushback of material filling the sample tubes. Once you attached a sample tube to the drill, you couldn't use it to drill heat flow stems into the ground. This was a specific concern on Apollo 16, where the HFE electronics box was torn from its cable after the first heat flow hole was drilled, but before the second hole had been drilled. Charlie Duke went on to drill the core sample, and was reminded that he couldn't drill another heat flow hole after he did this. He responded that, if they could by some miracle fix the HFE electronics cable, he was simply planning on trying to drop the second probe into the deep core sample hole.

On all of the missions that included the HFE (four in all, although it was only deployed successfully on two), the alternate plan in case the drill failed was to dig a long trench and bury the probes lengthwise... which never made a lot of sense to me.

-the other Doug

I know this topic asked for actual spacecraft photos, but I thought
folks might like to know about all the great images at Sven Knudsen's
Web site:

http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/models.html#fotos

In particular:

http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/probes/probes.html

http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/sovietsp/sovietsp.html

Here are some Soviet Mars probes:

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Mars-1, launched in 1962. Enroute to Mars, a faulty valve caused its attitude-control gas to leak out. Before it was gone, mission scientists placed it in spin stabilization, and contact was maintained to a considerable distance. On the top is the mid-course correction engine. Parabolic antenna for transmission of images from Mars, micrometeorites were sensed by the back of the solar panels. The hemispherical domes on ether side are radiators for the temperature control system. Liquid was circulated through the dark and light areas, and heat exchanged with gas inside the centralpressurized compartments. During the cruise, communication was via the helical semidirectional antennas on the radiator domes. Just to the lower right of the parabolic antenna is the methane-band spectrometer designed by Lebedinsky. The 32-kilogram 70mm phototelevision camera looked out through windows on the bottom.

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M-69, created from a zoom-out shot in a film. The spacecraft was an intermediate design leading up to the Mars-3 and Venera-9 designs. Note temperature control radiator bottom center, central fuel tanks for midcourse correction and orbital insertion. White tank in lower write (and one on lower left you can't see well) were pressurized instrument compartents for the radio and color camera systems.

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Mars-3 actual craft (left) and a model (right) in Kaluga. The model shows where science instruments were mounted, microwave radiometer, and the windows for the cameras. What is the thing on the boom lower left???

On actual craft, note the thermal radiators between the central body and solar panels. Again, conical helical antennas were used for all routine inflight communication, during spin stabilized mode. Bottom center are the astronavigation sensors, all duplicated for safety. The central stack of cans are solar direction sensors. On either side are telescopes for sighting Canopus. Above the solar sensors, is the Earth sensors, pointing in the same direction as the parabolic antenna. Above the right-most canopus sensor is a Mars horizon sensor.

The helical semi-directional antennas produce and receive circularly polarized radio waves. They are shaped to produce a funnel-shaped radiation pattern of a particular angle. While spin stabilized and facing the solar panels toward the Sun, the Earth is always witin the antenna's "funnel". Multiple antennas are seen, with different funnel angles for time intervals of the flight.

I have never seen a photograph of Mars-5, just drawings. Anyone ever see one???

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The Mars-3 lander, with heavy outer foam impact shell. The model in the Lavochkin museum is probably mostly made out of real parts. Two optico-mechanical panoramic cameras were the same design as Luna-13's. A small mini rover was to be ejected, on a long cable, to walk away and measure various soil parameters.

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The Fobos spacecraft, before and after the thermal vacuum shielding was installed. The earlier Mars and Venera probes were about 6 tons, but Fobos was 8 tons. An impressive demonstration of the Proton rocket payload capacity.

This does not look like a drawing to me:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/mars_4.jpg

Ah yes, I forgot about that one. Thanks. Here's a better version of Mars-4 and 5. The base of these Mars/Venus probes was a toroidal instrument compartment with fans that circulated cooled nitrogen around and around.

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There was also the orbiter version of M-71, which was meant to arrive at Mars first (even before Mariner-9) and act as a radio becon. But it was stranded in Earth orbit as Kosmos-419:

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If you want a new challenge, find a photo of Mars-6 and -7 that isn't just a mislabeled picture of Mars-3! They're probably very similar, but Mars-6 didn't have most of the cameras and orbital experiments.

A French radio experiment called "Stereo" was on Mars-3, but it failed. Blamont claims that the failure was because Stereo was installed in Kosmos-419! But I'm not sure this is the whole truth, because the photos show it installed also on Mars-3.

NASA publication ( Monographs in Aerospace History N° 15 - The difficult road to Mars ) has good tech drawings of Mars 3 hardware and its trajectory to the red planet...
I believe it exists as an online-edition ...

The Difficult Road to Mars: A Brief History of Mars Exploration in the Soviet Union

http://klabs.org/richcontent/Reports/mars/...oad_to_mars.pdf

The picture of the M-71 orbiter comes from that monograph by Perminov. The images in it are quite small. The nicer picture of Mars-5 comes from a Russian book on the mission (Poverkhnosti Marsa).

Let's see some Venus probes. I think I happen to have a few pictures of those...

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Venera-1, the first space probe to combine all the essential features of a planetary probe: solar power, high-gain radio connection, 3-axis orientation, midcourse correction ability and thermal control. The parabolic antenna has a fine copper mesh that you can just barely see here. In the Mars version (1M), the may have been on the other side of the craft, so it was designed to no block the solar panels. In flight communcation was via semidirectional antennas (the quadrupole antennas seen on the back of the solar panel). The dome on the top is a thermal cover for the course-correction rocket. Below the dome are astronavigation sensors for locating the Earth, Sun and the star Canopus. A spherical entry capsule carrying pennants can be seen just to the right of the parabolic antenna mount.

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Zond-3, an example of the 3MV flyby model, essentially identical to Venera-2. Course correction engine is at the top, camera portholes are on the bottom. Like the 2MV (Mars-1), domes with circulating fluid were used to regulate temperature. Zond-3 had experimental ion engines for attitude control, the first use of electric propulsion in space.

On the upper left, below the engine, you can see the sun-location sensors on a protuding pedistal. After locking on the sun, the craft would rotate about that axis to locate Canopus with a star locator inside a quatz dome. On the right, you see an extending cylinder with another copy of the precision solar locator -- a backup system for pointing the course-correction engine directly at the Sun.

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Venera-3 was a 3MV lander model, carrying a landing probe very similar to Venera-4, but containing some different experiments, such as a rocking sensor to see if it landed on a solid or liquid surface. It also contained a gamma-ray experiment to measure surface rock isotopes. Venera-3 was actually a repurposed Mars probe. Zond-1 was an actual Venus lander model, only different slightly (less dense solar cells for example).

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Venera-4 was the first space probe to perform in situ measurement in the environment of another planet. This probe, built by NPO Lavochkin instead of Korolev's bureau, had many improvements. Thermal radiation was a gas circulation system, using the parabolic antenna as a cold radiator. In the leftmost photo, you can see the actual landing capsule with its phenolic-resin heat shield (not the polished white capsule displayed in museums). In the rightmost image, you see the craft with thermal vacuum shield installed. Note the differently shaped conical helical semidirectional antennas -- another example of the tuned funnel-shaped radiation pattern for efficient Earth communcation while spin stabilized. The parabolic antennas were only used to relay images and telemetry from planetary encounters.

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Here you can see a test of the pyrotechnic charges deploying the landing capsule. And in case you wondered why the Soviets had such extensive air conditioning systems on their probes, here is a technician working on the Venera-4 main bus...packed solid with vacuum tubes.

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Venera-7 and 8 carried a much larger, more substantial landing capsule.

Don, did the Soviet Mars probes launched in late 1960 - and all of
which failed - look like Venera 1 or Mars 1?

Paolo Ulivi has a rough graphic of one on his Web site, but I
wondered if you knew of any actual photos or more detailed
drawings of what would have been humanity's first Mars probes?

http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/1M.html

Apparently there was going to be a third Mars probe sent with
the other two in 1960, but it was never launched. Does anyone
know what happened to it? Was it used for another mission or
did it end up in a museum? Or worse, scrap?

About ten years ago a friend reproduced what he thought Mars
would look like through the cameras of the Mars 1 probe had it
made it to Mars in 1963. I will see if he has it online and is
willing to display it here. As I recall, he presumed it would
look a bit better than the first images from Mariner 4.

1M looked like Venera-1, it was before the second-generation (2MV) probes were designed (such as Mars-1).

Because of the late launch, 1M was reduced to a sort of "Pioneer V" type mission. In other words, just launch it into space to save face. The course correction engine was removed, so 1M as launched would not have had the dome-shaped struction on top. 1M was also supposed to carry the Luna-3 type phototelevision camera, looking out through a window on the side of the cylindrical body. That was also removed.

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Mars-1 carried a 70mm phototelevision camera of considerable size. It's hard to say what images from it would have looked like. If the radio link had functioned well, the pictures should have been Zond-3 quality or better, since it was build by the same team and used a much larger film size than Zond-3. The radio system, was similar to the one used later for Zond-3. It carried 112 frames of film and scanned images of 1440 lines. I would guess Mars-1 images would have been much higher quality than Mariner-4 -- but that's not saying much!

For those of you adept at image "magic," here is a link to an
image of Magellan being deployed from the Shuttle during STS-30.
It struck me that the image of Magellan over a dazzling, partly
cloud-covered Earth could be "adjusted" to produce a very
real-appearing image of Magellan orbiting Venus.
Of course, one would have to erase Magellan's SRM, as well
as the Shuttle itself. In addition, one would also have to "deploy"
Magellan's solar panels. Are there any takers out there?

ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/gifcraft/magndply.gif


I imagine that there may be better quality images of this deployment
out there, but this was the best that I could locate.
In fact, an image that showed all of Magellan's antenna structure
would be a plus.

Another Phil

Here's a nice site with pictures of Magellan. They have a nice high-res version of that photo, and many others: Magellan

Anyone know what the resolution of the Lacrosse SAR satellite is? Presumably much better than Magellan.

This online NASA book about the Goddard Spaceflight Center has
lots of nice photos of actual satellites and rocket launches going
back to the early days, many of them in color:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4312/sp4312.htm

Fantastic. That was a new one to me.

We are fortunate that the American space program is so well documented. Something you appreciate when you're trying to interview 80-year-old Russians about what instruments were inside a failed 1962 Venus lander...

Here is a batch of the second-generation Venus probes built at NPO Lavochkin. There were the last spacecrafts overseen by Babakin, who died in 1975. Maksimov had designed the probes built in Korolev's bureau before Babakin. Both men were highly regarded by their peers.

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The main spacecraft bus is the same as Mars-3, but the descent apparatus is quite different. Here we see a front view (left) showing solar panels, the parabolid antenna and semidirectional (conical helical) antennas. Helical antennas emit circularly polarized waves. On the lander, notice the shutters stuck on the outside of the spherical heatshield -- these regulate temperature by opening up to space or closing to hold in heat. In the rear view, notice the large meter-band helical antennas, used for communication with the lander. Finally (right) we see the craft as it was launched, with the thermal vacuum shielding. The tent over the parabolid antenna is to prevent solar heat from being focused on the antenna element.

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The Venera-9 lander. Notice the four headlamps, two below each camera. These proved to be unnecessary and were omitted thereafter. The helical antenna on top is the counterpart to the meter-band antennas on the back of the spacecraft bus. They are quadrifilar, four interleaved helixes, a design that allows the shape of the radiation pattern to be electronically changed. Note the small cup anemometer on top of the aerobrake, to the left. And just below the brake, in the center, the two lenses of the cloud-density nephelometers.

The other two images show Venera-13, which was equiped with a soil drill and many other experiments. The large sausage-shaped tank seen at the left on the second picture is a vacuum reservoir used by the soil experiment. After the drill bites into the ground, pyrocharges propel the soid into the x-ray fluorescent analyzer, and the vacuum reservoir sucks out the excess atmosphere in the analyzer chamber.

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Venera-15 and 16 were the first missions to employ synthetic aperture radar, orbiting Venus for one Venusian day and mapping the northern third of the planet with a resolution of 1 km. Prior to that, Pioneer-12 had made altimetry readings with 150 km resolution, and made some crude side-looking-radar measurements (with the altimeter) around the equator.

Venera-15 also carried a planetary Fourier spectrometer, which recorded spectra along the radar mapping paths.

In the spacecraft, notice the double-sized solar panels, extra large parabolic antenna and generous supply of cold-gas propellant for orientation. In a 24-hour orbit, it make a fast pass over the north pole near pericenter of the orbit, then oriented parabolic dish to Earth and relayed the tape-recorded radio holograms at about 100 kbits/sec. Next to the large radar antenna is the smaller altimeter antenna. Below them is a pressurized toroidal compartment containing the radar electronics. Essentially this is the same system as the Almaz-T satellite.

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Vladimir Kurt first proposed that a mission could visit Venus and continue on to rendezvou with Halley's comment. The Venera-Galley (VeGa) mission was packed with experiments, including many designed with East-European and French collaborators. On the bus were the usual Venus instruments, in addition to more experiments to study the comet than the rest of the Halley probes (Japanese and European) combined.

The lander was also packed with extras, a complete Venera lander plus a balloon aerostat (seen to the right in the background). The balloon and gas tanks are mounted in a ring above the aerobrake. Most of the lander's experiments were focused on studying the clouds. Vega was an astoundingly complex mission, and on the whole quite successful.