USSR Probes on Venus

[BobHegwood]

Bob,

thanks a lot for the PDF document !

Landing on Venus: Past and future
A.T. Basilevsky, M.A. Ivanov, J.W. Head, M. Aittola, J. Raitala

This PDF document is very precise, and the match is perfect with the coordinates I used. It confirms the locations of most probes in my SSC file

My pleasure Martin. I'm glad I managed to help in some small way. Thanks also for the zip file. I really enjoy having these locations identified on our known Solar System objects. Makes the exploration of our Universe quite a bit more interesting, so thanks again for all of your work here. Much appreciated my friend.

[BobHegwood]

One other bit of advice here Martin...

Your models directory is named "mesh" in the file I downloaded. You need to rename this to "models" in order to display the 3ds meshes properly within Celestia. Just FYI...

[Cham]

Your models directory is named "mesh" in the file I downloaded. You need to rename this to "models"

Ooops !

[LordFerret]

Don't know if this helps any, but this site shows landing sites (USA, USSR, ESA). You can also turn on the lon/lat grid overlays and zoom in.
http://jules.unavco.org/

[Cham]

Thanks LordFerret.

This web site is very slow.

I may add the Mars Polar Lander "probable" crash site.

[LordFerret]

Yes, the site is a little slow. But if you allow the Java applet to load you can zoom in on each of the probe sites with lon/lat on and get their locations (hh:mm:ss). The only thing missing are cited references where those locations datas come from.

[Cham]

I'm comparing the coordinates found in several independant sources (NASA, ESA, etc). In most cases, they agree with some small variations. There are some uncertainties on the coordinates of all the "old" probe locations.

[Cham]

And here is the SSC code for the US Pioneer Venus probes. We now have a complete location set for all the Venus probes so far.

Code: Select all

# The Pioneer mission to Venus consisted of two components,
# launched separately: an Orbiter and a Multiprobe.

"Pioneer V Large-P Impact" "Sol/Venus"
{
        Class "spacecraft"
        Mesh "crash.3ds"
   Beginning "1978 11 16"
        Radius 0.0008  # Approximate

   LongLat [59.3 -4.4 0.001]
   Orientation [-4.4 1 0 0]
   RotationOffset 106.75
        Albedo 0

   InfoURL "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Venus_project"
}

"Pioneer V North-P Impact" "Sol/Venus"
{
        Class "spacecraft"
        Mesh "crash.3ds"
   Beginning "1978 11 20"
        Radius 0.0004

   LongLat [-4.8 -53.9 0.001]
   Orientation [-53.9 1 0 0]
   RotationOffset 42.65
        Albedo 0

   InfoURL "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Venus_project"
}

"Pioneer V Day-P Impact" "Sol/Venus"
{
        Class "spacecraft"
        Mesh "crash.3ds"
   Beginning "1978 11 20"
        Radius 0.0004

   LongLat [-317.0 31.3 0.001]
   Orientation [31.3 1 0 0]
   RotationOffset -269.55
        Albedo 0

   InfoURL "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Venus_project"
}

"Pioneer V Night-P Impact" "Sol/Venus"
{
        Class "spacecraft"
        Mesh "crash.3ds"
   Beginning "1978 11 20"
        Radius 0.0004

   LongLat [-56.7 28.7 0.001]
   Orientation [28.7 1 0 0]
   RotationOffset -9.25
        Albedo 0

   InfoURL "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Venus_project"
}


[BobHegwood]

And here is the SSC code for the US Pioneer Venus probes. We now have a complete location set for all the Venus probes so far.

Again, thanks very much Martin. Do you not have a life either?
All kidding aside, however, it is simply really amazing to me how much JUNK we have already left all over the Solar System. Wonder what the place is going to look like in two hundred years?