SOVIET VENERA 13 PROGRAM (October 1981 - Mars 1982)
Ozza Mons (No elevation data)
VENUS
The mountain
Ozza Mons (No elevation data) is an inactive volcano on planet Venus near the equator. Ozza mons is name after Uzza, a goddess of fertility and venerated femininity in pre-Islamic Arabia. She had her statue in the Kaaba where she was supposed to reside. Four temporally variable surface hotspots were discovered at the Ganiki Chasma rift zone near volcanoes Ozza Mons and Maat Mons in 2015, suggestive of present volcanic activity. However, interpreting these types of observations from above the cloud layer correctly is a challenge.
The program
Venera 13 (Венера) , meaning Venus 13) was a probe in the Soviet Venera program for the exploration of Venus. Venera 13 and 14 were identical spacecraft built to take advantage of the 1981 Venus launch opportunity and launched 5 days apart, Venera 13 on 30 October 1981 at 06:04 UTC and Venera 14 on 4 November 1981 at 05:31 UTC, both with an on-orbit dry mass of 760 kg (1,680 lb).As the cruise stage flew by Venus the bus acted as a data relay for the lander and then continued on into a heliocentric orbit. It was equipped with a gamma-ray spectrometer, UV grating monochromator, electron and proton spectrometers, gamma-ray burst detectors, solar wind plasma detectors, and two-frequency transmitters which made measurements before, during, and after the Venus flyby. The bus continued to provide data until at least 25 April 1983.
Leonid Ksanfomaliti of Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (a contributor to the Venera mission) and Stan Karaszewski of Karas, suggested signs of life in the Venera images in an article published in Solar System Research. According to Ksanfomaliti, certain objects resembled a "disk", a "black flap" and a "scorpion" which "emerge, fluctuate and disappear", referring to their changing location on different photographs and traces on the ground.
Engineers familiar with the probe have identified the moving "disk" as actually being the two lens caps ejected from the lander. Rather than a single object that had moved between two different places, they are simply two inanimate similar-looking objects in different places. The other "objects" are ascribed to image processing artifacts and do not appear in the original photography.
The editors of Solar System Research published an editorial comment and a number of commentary articles from other scientists in their September 2012 publication of Issue 5, Volume 46 of the journal. That issue also includes a second article from Ksanfomaliti, in which he claims to identify several other life forms and speculates regarding the apparent rich diversity of life around the landing site.
These claims have been refuted by the Live Science website.
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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
