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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 11th, 2023
  • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.workstoWorld News@lemmy.world•Soviet-era Venus probe plunges back to Earth after 53 yearsEnglish
    1·
    1 minute ago

    Hey friend. Calling the Venera probes “junk” is selling them short. The Soviet Venus program pulled off some genuinely insane feats between the ’60s and early ’80s—basically the punch-card era of spaceflight.

    • Venera 7 was the first spacecraft to land on another planet and send data back (1970).
    • Venera 9 delivered the first photo taken from the surface of another planet (1975).
    • Venera 13 survived 450°C heat and 90 atmospheres of pressure in 1982, long enough to send back color photos, audio from the surface, and a full soil analysis. No other country—not even now—has matched that on Venus.

    All of this was done with computers running at 100–200 kHz and 8 KB of memory. For comparison, modern smartphones have 3–6 GB of RAM, multi-core CPUs clocking in at 2.5+ GHz, and literally millions of times the processing power. Your phone wouldn’t last five seconds on Venus. Venera 13 lasted 127 minutes.

    Despite the harshest planetary environment we’ve ever targeted—900°F surface temps, atmospheric pressure like 3,000 feet underwater, and clouds of sulfuric fucking acid—the Venera program still racked up a list of milestones:

    Here’s how their success rate compares to other space programs:
    Program Missions Successes Failures Success Rate Notes
    Soviet Venera 28 15 13 ~54% First landings, first photos, audio, and soil data from Venus
    NASA Venus (Mariner) 5 3 2 60% All flybys—no landings
    NASA (modern planetary) Many ~75–85% Varies ~75–85% Achieved after decades of experience and tech refinement
    SpaceX (Falcon era) 300+ ~98% Few ~98% Mostly low Earth orbit and ISS missions, not planetary landings

    SpaceX has incredible reliability, but they’re launching commsats and resupply capsules—not trying to drop hardware onto a planet that eats spacecraft for breakfast. NASA has never returned data from the surface of Venus, despite multiple attempts. Mars is a far easier target in every possible way, and it still took decades to achieve consistent success.

    Venera’s 54% success rate wasn’t a sign of failure—it was a sign of pushing the boundaries of what was possible. They were first. They were bold. And they made history with kilobyte-level hardware and pressure vessels tougher than your car’s engine block.

    This wasn’t junk. It was triumph.

    Visual and audio proof:

  • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•How is your year going so far?
    9·
    9 hours ago

    Honestly pretty great. I love my relatively new position at my company, my career track is great, and it seems like people above me might be aware of the good job I am doing. Plus it’s more money than I have ever made in my life, so while I’m still underpaid for my role, I get to WFH wherever I want, and this has all allowed me to buy my first house in rural northern Maine, with almost 11 acres. I close in 27 days and then I can GTFO of my parents’ house, where I have been for 15 months. With any luck I can then find a Canadian wife and get dual citizenship, the better to flee when the trump gestapo come for me for whatever made up reason they come up with.

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