Venera 11 - Flight Platform

Flight Platform

After ejection of the lander probe, the flight platform continued on past Venus in a heliocentric orbit. Near encounter with Venus occurred on December 25, 1978, at approximately 34,000 km altitude. The flight platform acted as a data relay for the descent craft for 95 minutes until it flew out of range and returned its own measurements on interplanetary space.

Venera 11 flight platform carried solar wind detectors, ionosphere electron instruments and two gamma ray burst detectors - the Soviet-built KONUS and the French-built SIGNE 2. The SIGNE 2 detectors were simultaneously flown on Venera 12 and Prognoz 7 to allow triangulation of gamma ray sources. Before and after Venus flyby, Venera 11 and Venera 12 yielded detailed time-profiles for 143 gamma-ray bursts, resulting in the first ever catalog of such events. The last gamma-ray burst reported by Venera 11 occurred on January 27, 1980

List of flight platform instruments and experiments:

• 30-166 nm Extreme UV Spectrometer
• Compound Plasma Spectrometer
• KONUS Gamma-Ray Burst Detector
• SNEG Gamma-Ray Burst Detector
• Magnetometer
• 4 Semiconductor Counters
• 2 Gas-Discharge Counters
• 4 Scintillation Counters
• Hemispherical Proton Telescope

The mission ended in February, 1980.