Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry (opens in new tab)

It's funny now - imagine being the Commissar for Lens Cap design in the old USSR and overseeing all that

Overbuild everything. For things that might be fragile-ish like surface mounted electronics, cast the whole thing in resin. As a sibling poster has mentioned, we shoot things out of artillery tubes these days that have way harsher accelerations than 300g.

There are electronics and gyroscopes designed for >9,000 G loads, in guided artillery shells.

Aerospace is awesome.

If anyone wants to try and see it the orbit is listed.

https://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=6073

Nitpicking, but wouldn't it be 300 Gs of deceleration? I know the math is basically the same, but technically the words a mean different things

May 9th is in that range. My goodness, how ironic it would be if it hit the parade in Moscow...

The blog post seems to say the reentry time depends somewhat on (future, unknown) solar activity, contributing to the estimation error.

Why would this be? Is the solar wind strong enough to affect the velocity of a dense object such as this?

or even better yet, landed on a desert and taking pictures of cactii and camels

Came here looking for this reference; left not dissapointed.

“Oscar: Irina, you know that Steve is bionic. If he's careful ...

Irina: You don't understand. I designed that probe for Venus. Venus Oscar. A planet with temperatures of 900 degrees, 300 mile per hour winds, pressures up to 90 earth atmospheres. Even a bionic man couldn't survive under those conditions.”

I would guess that the most expensive part of such an endeavor wouldn't be the launch; it would be developing and building a spacecraft capable of capturing it and bringing it back.

Even the Space Shuttle wasn't necessarily a perfect fit for the job as-is. Hubble was serviced many times, but it was specifically designed for on-orbit capture and servicing by the Shuttle. Before they decommissioned the shuttle they actually had to install an extra piece of hardware to make it feasible to capture and de-orbit using future non-crewed spacecraft. And even then that's just to make sure it crashes in a safe place, not to bring it home intact.

There was also a mission to service a satellite that wasn't designed for the purpose, and they had a really hard time capturing it and very nearly had to give up after days' worth of failed attempts. It finally took simultaneous EVA by three astronauts to coordinate a successful capture (one to grab it by hand, two to get it onto a specialized adapter rig built just for that satellite so that the Canadarm could hold it), which is quite a thing considering that the Shuttle's only designed to allow two people on EVA at a time.

This craft is likely tumbling, which I presume would make it unacceptably dangerous for a crewed mission (and certainly rules out anyone just going out there and grabbing it with their hands), in addition to making successful capture that much more difficult.

Perhaps scientists would have some particular interest in that particular hardware as it had been launched and flown in Earth orbit, but I'll tell ya: it's way easier to get your hands on flight spare equipment; while this stuff hasn't flown, it's probably a really good copy of whatever they did launch into space, and way better condition.

When I worked "on Mars" there was a "flight spare" copy of a Viking instrument which was the predecessor to the one we were working on, and of course it was encased in Plexiglas as a museum piece, but it was truly a redundant copy, as NASA was into copying everything they sent into space, (what was the saying in Contact? "Why have only one, when you can buy two at twice the price?") so that if anything needed to be tweaked, or went wrong, they would have this copy on the ground that they could experiment with to their hearts' content.

I don't think we have any active craft capable of recovering it. The space shuttle probably could have done it, but with a cost of about $1.5b per launch, there is no way that would be worth it.

SpaceX's Dragon 2 easily has enough cargo capacity to bring it down (~3 tons vs 0.5 ton), but there's still the question of intercepting, capturing, and securing it in Dragon's cargo bay. That would still cost something north of $100m to recover the lander.

In principle this is not science fiction, Space Shuttle captured a satellite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49, they just didn't return it back. It was a catch, fix, and release.

You're quite overestimating our capabilities as a species if you think that planning, developing, and launching a recovery mission in a few weeks would be even remotely feasible. Sure, we've known that the thing's up there all this time, so in the very counterfactual scenario where we had started thinking about a retrieval mission a few of years ago, and the Space Shuttle was still a thing, and someone was willing to foot the n-hundred-million-dollar bill, I guess? I don't think any nation on Earth currently has the hardware required to rendezvous with a random spacecraft in orbit and bring it down in one piece. The Shuttle was unique in that respect.

This thing would be going at higher than earth orbital velocity, making an in-space capture of it more or less impossible.

Who’s gonna pay for that?

space shuttle, the air force still has one, doesn't it? also, elon could whip something up.

Parachute deployment was possibly gasodynamic rather than electronically controlled. In which case there's a broad similarity on reentry in Earth atmosphere which could trigger the release.

In my experience, in soviet engineering they don't augment stuff unless absolutely necessary. As a result, stuff tend to work as long as the physics work. It results in relatively crude but simple and reliable machines. The elegance comes from simplicity, in western tech the elegance comes from being well thought and designed for specific use cases. I.e. a Lada will be uncomfortable, loud, uneconomical car but at the same time it will withstand abuse and be easy to repair enough to get it going.

Thinking about the elevator in our commie block, it would have given a heart attack to a western European. Instead of having double doors to keep us safe from the moving wall, it had pads on the bottom and top edge so if your hand or leg is stuck, the pad will be pushed and the elevator will stop immediately. Also there was a tiny cabinet door on the right side so you can access the mechanism to force open the door or force move/halt the elevator. As kids, we would be experimenting with those mechanisms. They worked every single time, no legs or arms were lost.

To be fair Venus' atmosphere is pretty much hell.

From a previous probe:

> Space law required that the space junk be returned to its national owner, but the Soviets denied knowledge or ownership of the satellite.[8] Ownership therefore fell to the farmer upon whose property the satellite fell. The pieces were thoroughly analyzed by New Zealand scientists which determined that they were Soviet in origin because of manufacturing marks and the high-tech welding of the titanium. The scientists concluded that they were probably gas pressure vessels of a kind used in the launching rocket for a satellite or space vehicle and had decayed in the atmosphere.[9]

I wonder how space law works when the national owner (CCCP) no longer exists? Does it go to Russia? Kazakhstan?

No

Whales are not typically found on land, and usually when they're already dead.

Yeah, that bureaucrat is at least 20% responsible for the current US administration

They would also remember there is a man with a cape in a phone booth that could be called upon to stop this thing.

Sorry, but there is still no chance it will land. It's safe to bet your house on it making a nice crater or just disappearing from radar into the drink.

Not likely.

This thing spent 50 years in high earth orbit. Everything will have received a huge dosage of radiation along with periodic freezing and boiling temperatures.

Something may have survived, life is crazy like that, but it's unlikely it will be a dangerous pathogen to humans. In fact, surviving life will have likely adapted to eat any of the pathogens.

Highly unlikely given sterilization before launch and Venus basically being a deep fryer

But also technically not impossible. For example if the dormant microbes react to prolonged microgravity and radiation in ways we don't understand, perhaps it brings back something we haven't seen before

Could be a fun science fiction plot

It's already the start for Night of the Living Dead.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43874642 and marked it off topic.

His name is not Vlad, it's a familiar form of a completely unrelated name. If you want to demonstrate contempt by using a familiar form, use Vova.

It sounds about the same as if I used something like "Joe" to refer to a William.