Moscow's Postcards from Venus

First color photos of a torrid surface stir envy in Houston

The pictures were somewhat fuzzy and the hues none too bright. But no one was complaining. The images presented remarkable, virtually unprecedented views of the nearest thing to an extraterrestrial hothouse: the scorching surface of Venus, where temperatures hover around 900DEG F, and atmospheric pressures are 90 times as heavy as those on earth.

The photographers were Venera (for Venus) 13 and 14, the latest in a series of Soviet robot envoys to the earth's nearest planetary neighbor. Venera 13 lasted two hours and seven minutes on the Venusian griddle, while its twin worked about half as long. But their handiwork survived to become the hit of the show at the 13th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston last week. As the photographs were shown to some 560 scientists, most of them Americans, oohs and aahs rose from the audience. Says University of Minnesota Physicist Robert Pepin: "There was no small amount of envy."

There was also considerable admiration. More so than many of the U.S.S.R.'s previous planetary probes, Venera 13 and 14 seem to have performed extremely well. Starting on their four-month, 185-million-mile journeys within a week of each other last fall, they approached Venus in late February, separated from their mother ships and drifted under parachute through the planet's dense carbon-dioxide atmosphere, blasting winds and corrosive clouds of sulfuric acid to touchdowns east of a mountainous region called Phoebe, just south of Venus' equator.

Venera 13 settled in Phoebe's foothills on March 1. Venera 14 landed in an area of rolling plains some 600 miles to the southeast four days later. The electronic eyes aboard each ship began working almost immediately, taking successive pictures through red, blue and green filters. This information was relayed back to earth, where the separate images were combined. Both landers provided panoramic views of a landscape strewn with rust-colored rocks. At either edge, the photographs showed patches of the orange Venusian sky, so colored because the thick atmosphere absorbs all the blue wavelengths in the light. In clarity and detail, the pictures exceeded the only previous views of Venus' surface, a series of black-and-white photographs radioed back by two earlier Soviet probes in 1975.

No less important scientifically, both landers managed to drill a few centimeters into the Venusian surface, scoop up some rock and analyze its chemistry. The conclusion: the material at both sites was basalt, fire-formed rock typically found in lava flows on earth. Indeed, based on its telltale traces of potassium, the material at Venera 14's site seemed uncannily like rocks that come out of the earth at the volcanically active mid-ocean ridges.

The findings provided the strongest evidence to date for a growing view among planetary scientists. Unlike the moon, Mercury or even Mars, Venus does not seem to be a dormant world, essentially unchanged for billions of years. The presence of what seems to be fresh lava-like material indicates that Venus either is still active with volcanic eruptions and lava flows or has only recently become quiescent. Says Pepin: "Here we have a planet like earth whose heat engine is still going strong."

In reporting the Soviet results in Houston, Valery Barsukov, director of the Soviet Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, made a pointed pitch for continued cooperation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (The U.S. provided radar maps of the Venus surface and helped the Soviets select the landing sites.) In 1985 another pair of Soviet probes will be dropped into the Venusian atmosphere while their mother ship hurtles on toward a rendezvous with Halley's comet. The U.S., meanwhile, is passing up the chance to intercept that rare heavenly visitor, and its plans for another visit to Venus remain in limbo.

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