#and not mars

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[everoutoftouch]

If you have Spotify reblog this and tag what your number one song on your “on repeat” playlist is.

[yume-fanfare]

SILENCE

the princess

is :3ing

[seasonofprophecy]

The bundle has passed its deadline! They have raised over 578,000 USD! The bundle was a success!

Please! Direct your attention now to direct fundraisers for families to evacuate!

@/el-shab-hussein made a masterpost of vetted fundraisers you can donate to, which you can click to see here!

Extend the energy that you showed to the bundle to these families! Thank you!

[big-armed-mar]

If something like this doesn’t happen in regards to the egg bois I’m not gonna be happy

Edit: changed the watermark

[soimse]

“He wants me so bad he just doesn’t know it yet” -Bill Cipher probably

[ink-the-artist]

Love the contrast between the Americans’ “Apollo” and the Soviets’ “Sputnik.” You got the Americans naming their rocket after a Greek god trying to communicate the grandness and importance of this rocket. And you got the Soviets naming their rocket “fellow traveler.” Like a friend you go on an  adventure with together. This rocket is our little friend lol 

[paintdoktahwho]

would solve a lot of problems i bet

[ladiemars]

okey dokey 👍

[marsoid]

Do u have any advice for artists who draw ridiculously slow???

draw faster

[cat-and-cazio]

[supermaks]

‘Guys this is not good now they’re gonna paint the left as dangerous and violent and use this to make themselves the victims and characterize everyone else as criminals’ y’all really been white in this country. It’s insane to me

[randanopterix]

Luffy gets some new kicks

[sailorsenshigifs]

[zegalba]

The tallest mountain in the solar system, Olympus Mons on Mars. It has a height of 25 km, Mount Everest is 'only' 8.8 km tall.

[deep-space-netwerk]

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Venera 9 managed to take a picture with one camera, but the other one's lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 10 also managed to take a picture with one camera, but again the other lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 11 took no pictures - neither lens cap deployed this time.

Venera 12 also took no pictures - because again, neither lens cap deployed.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.