Study of Venera Spacecraft Trajectories and Wider Implications

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1. Verfasser: Hibberd, Adam
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Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Hibberd, Adam
author_facet Hibberd, Adam
contents Historically, there is no doubt that the early years of the USSR space program put them way ahead of the competition (the USA). Nonetheless, although this was not what the Russians wished to present to the world, the interplanetary campaign, centred around missions to the planet Venus (the Venera program) was also beset with difficulties. Many of the early Venera probes failed, despite making it to a heliocentric orbit, but naturally the success rate improved with time. The result is that there are now many Venera probes in heliocentric orbits, either completely intact, or the main bus after a successful deployment of the lander; together with the associated Blok-L upper stages. This paper is a response to some previous quite contentious research proposing that a certain member of a new class of objects, designated $2005\ VL_1$ may in fact be the Venera-2 probe. In this paper we look into the invariance of the Earth Tisserand parameter in an attempt to establish if there are indeed any members of this class which could be Venera probes. It is found, with extremely small probability, that compared to a sample of randomly chosen NEOs, members of the class of Dark Comet have an Earth Tisserand unusually close to 3, a property shared by the Venera missions. Furthermore there are particular associations of 3 Dark Comets with 3 of these probes, the most significant being $2010\ VL_{65}$ with the Venera-12 mission
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_09478
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Study of Venera Spacecraft Trajectories and Wider Implications
Hibberd, Adam
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Historically, there is no doubt that the early years of the USSR space program put them way ahead of the competition (the USA). Nonetheless, although this was not what the Russians wished to present to the world, the interplanetary campaign, centred around missions to the planet Venus (the Venera program) was also beset with difficulties. Many of the early Venera probes failed, despite making it to a heliocentric orbit, but naturally the success rate improved with time. The result is that there are now many Venera probes in heliocentric orbits, either completely intact, or the main bus after a successful deployment of the lander; together with the associated Blok-L upper stages. This paper is a response to some previous quite contentious research proposing that a certain member of a new class of objects, designated $2005\ VL_1$ may in fact be the Venera-2 probe. In this paper we look into the invariance of the Earth Tisserand parameter in an attempt to establish if there are indeed any members of this class which could be Venera probes. It is found, with extremely small probability, that compared to a sample of randomly chosen NEOs, members of the class of Dark Comet have an Earth Tisserand unusually close to 3, a property shared by the Venera missions. Furthermore there are particular associations of 3 Dark Comets with 3 of these probes, the most significant being $2010\ VL_{65}$ with the Venera-12 mission
title Study of Venera Spacecraft Trajectories and Wider Implications
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09478