Credit NASA



    The Pioneer Venus Mission consisted of two major parts: the Multiprobe and the Orbiter. The Multiprobe was composed of the carrier or Bus (290 kg); Sounder, a large probe (315 kg) and 3 smaller probes (90 kg each). It was launched on August 8, 1978. the multiprobe reached Venus on December 9,1978 and the large probe was released on November 15.

    The Neutral Mass Spectrometer on the large probe measured composition of Venus’ atmosphere from 60 km to surface during which atmospheric pressure varied by 3 orders of magnitude, yielding derived values for pressure, temperature, density and tabulated values from 15 to 208 amu based on scans every 64 sec. Unfortunately, requirements for data archiving were limited and the results were submitted and stored at the NSSDCA as 29 pages of hard copy. The NSSDCA team used optical character recognition to extract data from these digitized scans and output the results in a CSV table as the basis for the Gas Sampling Data Table in this archive.

    Reference
    Seiff, A., et al., Measurements of thermal structure and thermal contrasts in the atmosphere of Venus and related dynamical observations: Results from the four Pioneer Venus probes, J. Geophys. Res., 85, No. A13, 7903-7933, 1980.

    Accessing to Data
    Citation
    PDS recommendations for citing data sets can be found here.

    IBelkhodja, I, D. R. Williams, and S. A. McLaughlin (2025), Pioneer Venus Large Probe LNMS Gas Sampling Data Bundle, PDS Atmospheres (ATM) Node, https://doi.org/10.1029/JA085iA13p07903