Venera 15
Soviet Venus orbiter
Venera 15 (Russian: Венера-15 meaning Venus 15) was a spacecraft sent to Venus by the Soviet Union. This uncrewed orbiter was to map the surface of Venus using high resolution imaging systems. The spacecraft was identical to Venera 16 and based on modifications to the earlier Venera space probes.
Mission profile
Venera 15 was launched on June 2, 1983, at 02:38:39 UTC and reached Venus's orbit on October 10, 1983.
The spacecraft was inserted into Venus orbit a day apart from Venera 16, with its orbital plane shifted by an angle of approximately 4° relative to the other probe. This made it possible to reimage an area if necessary. The spacecraft was in a nearly polar orbit with a periapsis ~1000 km, at 62°N latitude, and apoapsis ~65000 km, with an inclination ~90°, the orbital period being ~24 hours.
Together with Venera 16, the spacecraft imaged the area from the north pole down to about 30°N latitude (approximately 25% of Venus surface) over the eight months of mapping operations.
Spacecraft structure
The Venera 15 and 16 spacecraft were identical and were based on modifications to the Venera 9 orbiter and the Venera 14 carrier spacecraft. Each spacecraft consisted of a 5 m (16 ft) long cylinder with a 0.6 m (2.0 ft) diameter, 1.4 m (4.6 ft) tall parabolic dish antenna for the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) at one end.
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This entry incorporates text from “Venera 15” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.