posted 01-22-2012 02:11 PM               

IANS/Times of India reports several objects resembling living beings were detected on photographs taken by a Russian landing probe in 1982 during a Venus mission, according to an article published in the Solar System Research magazine.

Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute of Russia's Academy of Sciences published a research that analysed the photographs from the Venus mission made by a Soviet landing probe, Venus-13, in 1982.

The photographs feature several objects, which Ksanfomaliti said, resembled a "disk", a "black flap" and a "scorpion".

All of them "emerge, fluctuate and disappear", the scientist said, referring to their changing location on different photographs and traces on the ground.

"What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus, let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," the magazine quoted Ksanfomaliti as saying.

posted 01-23-2012 05:17 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by MB:
So what in the picture is supposed to represent "life" on Venus?

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posted 01-23-2012 09:18 PM               

According to Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, who processes many of the images taken during NASA's Mars missions, higher-resolution versions of the Venera 13 images show that the crablike object is actually a mechanical component, not a living creature. The same object shows up in a photograph taken by an identical landing probe, Venera 14, which landed nearby on Venus.

"If those objects were already on the surface of Venus, what are the chances that Venera 13 and 14, which landed nearly 1,000 kilometers apart, would both land inches away from the only ones in sight and they would be in the same positions relative to the spacecraft? It makes much more sense that it's a piece of the lander designed to break off during the deployment of one of the scientific instruments," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries.

According to NASA, the half-circle components are camera lens covers that popped off the Venera probes after they landed. As for why they appear to be in different places in the two Venera 13 photos, "Venera-13 had two cameras, one in front and one in back. The one image shows the front camera lens cap and the other shows the rear camera lens cap, not one lens cap that moved," said Ted Stryk, a photo editor who reprocesses and enhances many NASA and Soviet space program images.

In fact, the half-circle objects are famous for being lens caps, because the one that popped off Venera 14's camera landed exactly where a spring-loaded arm was meant to touch the Venusian surface in order to measure its compressibility. The lander ended up measuring properties of the cap.

The other photograph highlighted by Ksanfomaliti, which supposedly shows a scorpionlike creature, contains a blur. "The features that Ksanfomaliti shows are nothing more than processed noise, at best, in some particularly bad versions of the images. They are not in the original data," Stryk said.