Surface of Venus taken by Venera 14. This picture is the combinaison of red, green and blue images, the whole is then combined with a grayscale image to get a « high» resolution image.
It’s still feels weird to me how surfaces of other planets look so “earth-like”.
Tell me about it. It gets even crazier knowing that Venus used to have habitable conditions way back. Now its so hot it rains molten lead.
You should check out Saturn’s moon Titan, it has conditions very similar to very early earth, except instead of liquid water, it’s so cold that there’s methane lakes on the surface. It’s a pretty good target for the search for extraterrestrial life. Those and the icy moons like Europa and Ganymede with liquid oceans under their frozen crusts. The moons are really exciting and there’s so many of them in our solar system
It managed to survive for just under a hour which was almost twice the expected duration.
Not bad for the 1980s, more info here
I have always loved these Venus surface photos, I really wish there were more beyond the Venera probes as I find the planet wonderful to learn about. Maybe in another lifetime.
It still blows my mind that humanity was able to land a probe with a working camera on Venus and transmit photos back in 1975.
Also the conditions under which the first images of Venus were taken (from WIkipedia):
Venera 9 measured clouds that were 30–40 km (19–25 mi) thick with bases at 30–35 km (19–22 mi) altitude. It also measured atmospheric chemicals including hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, bromine and iodine. Other measurements included surface pressure of about 9,100 kilopascals (90 atm), temperature of 485 °C (905 °F), and surface light levels comparable to those at Earth mid-latitudes on a cloudy summer day.
Its weird how there’s oxygen only on earth and no traces of oxygen on all the plants discovered so far.
There is dioxygen in Mars atmosphere, there is even water.
Jesus! So its true, daddy elon wants capitalize on that.