Venera 12 - Flight Platform

Flight Platform

Venera 12 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 12 occurred on January 5, 1980. Venera 12 used its ultraviolet spectrometer to study Comet Bradfield on 13 February 1980, and reported spectrophotometric data until 19 March 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 active phase of the science mission for the flight platform ended in April, 1980.

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