Celestia Forums

I just want to address something Fridger wrote in this thread: venus 32k/64k (http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... 9&start=45), but I'm putting it here in Purgatory.

t00fri wrote:This should have become clear in my response to Spiff:

t00fri wrote:After the Soviets spent lots of money & effort to get to Venus, they also must have had an interest to publish their solid scientific results on behalf of the Venera mission in accepted international journals!

[ deletia - see original above ]

If the lead scientists from Venera believed these images to be reliable, they would have pushed to get their names out on respective papers. You BET!

Where are they??

The situation of Soviet science is not as you make out Fridger. Soviet policy has a lot to do with whether such eager Soviet scientists ever got their way. Since the (Russian) Soviets suffered two publci relaitions disasters by the UK in the '50's, control freakery and blame culture was rife in the Russain space industry since. The disasters both involved Jodrell Bank near Manchester:
- First, it provided Sputnik I tracking data that a bunch of British schoolboys and their physics teacher used to extrapolate the location of the secret Soviet launch site at Baikonur in Khazakstan.*
- Second, Soviet transmissions of the first images of the Moon's far side by Luna 3 in 1959 were again intercepted by Jodrell Bank. Since the Soviets had used a simple fax protocal to encode the images, it was easy for Jodrell to forward the pictures to The Times newspaper in London, and these pictures appeared in The Times before anywhere in the Soviet Union.

After that Soviet scientists were stongly controlled in any raw scientific data being shared outside the USSR - especially space missions. How many knew of the Soviet Manned Missions to the Moon even 20 years ago?

There are several examples of Soviet space missions where Soviet scientists were not permitted to or not given resources to process scientific data and publish it if the Soviet authorities deemed it less than perfect for communist propaganda. The Venera missions are not exceptional: the 'colour' photographs were not released until after the USSR broke up: because it had missing colour data - that one photo is nevertheless not monochrome.

Other examples of poor completion of mission or data analysis:
- This one on reserved policy: An ex-mission scientist gave an interview to a UK science documentary (probably Horizon) and said that it was known that Lunokhod would soon run out of power: he suggested sending the rover to some nearby lunar hills to at least a get a good panorama to show the Soviet peoples. He was overriden by officious project managers who were afraid of being blamed by the Kremlin for losing the rover in rough ground, and so, as he said "the mission died without music."
- This one on poor Soviet computational processing power for data/image analysis. The Soviet Almaz satellite (and perhaps also their nuclear powered RORSAT SAR spy satellites) had an analogue method of producing SAR imagery: lacking digital processing power, the radar would make an interferogram on a photographic film which was then dropped to earth, to get the radar image, Soviets used the interferogram as a hologram. The images were often noisy. After USSR breakup, some token Almaz raw data was passed to the West and processed in a fully digital manner - signal-to-noise ratios improved by 20dB-30dB, the pictures were stunning.

Many times, Soviet space missions were let down by reluctant authority and poor digital processing technology.

Spiff.

* Something Sasha Baron Cohen doesn't let Borat mention...

I wonder how much stuff was published at the time in soviet journals too (not in english).

The restrictions were relaxed somewhat after the late 70s though. Alexander Basilevsky (listed in the biographies on those Venera pages) and many of his colleagues were allowed to work with their American counterparts (I know there were frequent exchanges between the Vernadskii institute in Moscow (?) and Brown University in Rhode Island in the US) and he was a regular visitor at LPSC in Houston where he often spoke about how they were allowed to get away with exchanging information without much restriction as time went by.

Spaceman Spiff wrote:I just want to address something Fridger wrote in this thread: venus 32k/64k (http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... 9&start=45), but I'm putting it here in Purgatory.

t00fri wrote:This should have become clear in my response to Spiff:

t00fri wrote:After the Soviets spent lots of money & effort to get to Venus, they also must have had an interest to publish their solid scientific results on behalf of the Venera mission in accepted international journals!

[ deletia - see original above ]

If the lead scientists from Venera believed these images to be reliable, they would have pushed to get their names out on respective papers. You BET!

Where are they??

The situation of Soviet science is not as you make out Fridger. Soviet policy has a lot to do with whether such eager Soviet scientists ever got their way. Since the (Russian) Soviets suffered two publci relaitions disasters by the UK in the '50's, control freakery and blame culture was rife in the Russain space industry since. The disasters both involved Jodrell Bank near Manchester:
- First, it provided Sputnik I tracking data that a bunch of British schoolboys and their physics teacher used to extrapolate the location of the secret Soviet launch site at Baikonur in Khazakstan.*
- Second, Soviet transmissions of the first images of the Moon's far side by Luna 3 in 1959 were again intercepted by Jodrell Bank. Since the Soviets had used a simple fax protocal to encode the images, it was easy for Jodrell to forward the pictures to The Times newspaper in London, and these pictures appeared in The Times before anywhere in the Soviet Union.

After that Soviet scientists were stongly controlled in any raw scientific data being shared outside the USSR - especially space missions. How many knew of the Soviet Manned Missions to the Moon even 20 years ago?

There are several examples of Soviet space missions where Soviet scientists were not permitted to or not given resources to process scientific data and publish it if the Soviet authorities deemed it less than perfect for communist propaganda. The Venera missions are not exceptional: the 'colour' photographs were not released until after the USSR broke up: because it had missing colour data - that one photo is nevertheless not monochrome.

Other examples of poor completion of mission or data analysis:
- This one on reserved policy: An ex-mission scientist gave an interview to a UK science documentary (probably Horizon) and said that it was known that Lunokhod would soon run out of power: he suggested sending the rover to some nearby lunar hills to at least a get a good panorama to show the Soviet peoples. He was overriden by officious project managers who were afraid of being blamed by the Kremlin for losing the rover in rough ground, and so, as he said "the mission died without music."
- This one on poor Soviet computational processing power for data/image analysis. The Soviet Almaz satellite (and perhaps also their nuclear powered RORSAT SAR spy satellites) had an analogue method of producing SAR imagery: lacking digital processing power, the radar would make an interferogram on a photographic film which was then dropped to earth, to get the radar image, Soviets used the interferogram as a hologram. The images were often noisy. After USSR breakup, some token Almaz raw data was passed to the West and processed in a fully digital manner - signal-to-noise ratios improved by 20dB-30dB, the pictures were stunning.

Many times, Soviet space missions were let down by reluctant authority and poor digital processing technology.

Spiff.

* Something Sasha Baron Cohen doesn't let Borat mention...

Spiff,

what a relief, to get back to the real things behind this important topic with you! Thanks for your interesting accounting from your perspective.

I can understand that Space research in Soviet Russia was a particular touchy discipline.

On the other hand, I am a witness of that period and attended a number of conferences there during the relevant years, not to mention all the many Russian scientists that I met during this time.

I am also fully aware of the successes (and difficulties) that Russian scientists met in the context of publishing their results in international journals.

Anyhow, it seems much of the potentially valuable mission data has been lost or at least the concise documentation of it has been lost. Really too bad...

Cheers,
Fridger