as far as I know, the only mission that was developed beyond the basic idea was the YuS Jupiter flyby and small perihelion solar probe. I was able to find a detailed description of it, which I used for my book "Robotic Exploration of the Solar System - part 2". IIRC the same source was used for an article in Quest a few years ago.
In the 1980s the Soviets also started their first serious studies of missions to the giant planets and to the vicinity of the Sun. The idea was that the missions should provide a leap in knowledge not only with respect to NASA’s Pioneer and Voyager reconnaissance, but also the follow-up work of the Galileo and out-of-ecliptic missions. Soviet scientists and engineers identified three baseline mission profiles to address these requirements. In the first profile, a spacecraft would fly within 100 km of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io and then use a slingshot of the planet to increase the inclination of its heliocentric orbit and send it back to pass within 3 or 4 million km of the Sun after a flight lasting just over 3 years. However, it would be difficult to make observations of Io because the relative velocity of the encounter would be greater than 40 km/s, and at such close range this would produce an angular rate exceeding the very demanding one degree per second which the Vegas had faced in attempting to track the nucleus of Halley at their closest approach. An alternative was to limit the mission to the Jovian system and land a capsule on Io. Another possibility was to use Jupiter to reach Saturn, where the spacecraft would enter orbit around the planet and deliver a Titan probe. If this could be done ahead of the joint US–European Cassini mission, then all the better. However, the most thoroughly studied option was the YuS (Yupiter–Solntsye; Jupiter–Sun) mission. It received the support of the Academy of Sciences; and many institutions, including some of the leading technical and scientific universities, agreed to participate. The YuS spacecraft would weigh 1,200 kg at launch and would incorporate the UMVL propulsion unit, a trajectory control module and a mission module. In fact, the trajectory control module was essentially the spacecraft’s bus. It was to be built around a 320-cm-diameter parabolic antenna designed to communicate at distances in excess of 6 billion km from Earth. As the principal structural element, it would support tanks and (depending on the mission) up to six RTGs. Beneath the antenna was a conical equipment section, with attachments for the mission module. In the case of YuS, this would be a 460-kg spin-stabilized Solnechnii Zond (solar probe) shaped like a ‘flying saucer’ and powered by a chemical battery. At its center was a thermally insulated spherical module housing most of the systems and electronics. Communications would be through a parabolic antenna mounted flush against the anti-Sun side of the saucer. An alternative design was for a conical mission module with 60 kg of scientific instruments. The trajectory module would carry most of the instruments for the Jupiter flyby, and would be discarded about 10 days prior to the solar encounter, the active part of which would last only 16 hours and involve both directly sampling the corona and making high-resolution observations in the X-ray, ultraviolet and visible ranges. For non-solar missions, the trajectory module would carry landers, atmospheric probes etc.The YuS project was named Tsiolkovskii after the early-20th-century Russian astronautics pioneer. On the schedule announced in 1987, the first mission, named Corona, was to be launched in 1995. At an international meeting about the solar–terrestrial relationship, it was suggested that Corona and Starprobe should be flown at the same time in order to make complementary studies. In 1999 missions would be launched that would release probes into Jupiter’s atmosphere and use that planet to reach Saturn carrying a Titan probe. The entry capsule for Jupiter would weigh 500 kg, and be able to endure a 1,500-g deceleration. The Lavochkin bureau built a special centrifuge to test it. One concept for the Titan probe was to use a balloon as the decelerator, and that after this had released the surface package it would rise to an altitude of about 10 km and report conditions for several days. Unfortunately, owing to the financial crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union the Tsiolkovskii project never left the drawing board, but Russian engineers and scientists continued to study advanced missions, in particular close-perihelion solar probes.
Outer planetary probes weren't attempted because they were simply beyond the reach of Soviet technological capabilities. They never demonstrated any success with Mars missions, trying to send a probe to Jupiter, Saturn, etc was asking far too much. Soviet engineering wasn't able to overcome the problems of reliable communication from those distances (one reason being that all communications infrastructure for space missions was in the USSR itself and they lacked NASA's global tracking network which greatly limited their tracking capabilities) or handling the cold temperatures of the outer solar system.The lack of an LH2-powered rocket stage also severely limited their ability to launch a probe to the outer Solar System.
-- Vacuum-qualified electronics and thermal control systems were never developed. Every unmanned spacecraft had a pressure hull filled with dry nitrogen at ~16psi with cooling fans blowing it around. Manned spacecraft had two pressure cabins, one for the crew and one for the electronics. Even today this system is used in Soyuz/Progress. It places a huge weight burden on the designers.
-- Even in the dry nitrogen environment, component failures were frequent and spacecraft lifetimes short.
Just look at the vast number of communication and ferret satellites launched compared with the US. Read the Springer book "Soviet Robots in the Solar System" for detailed accounts of the many failures on Moon, Venus, and Mars probes.
So Soviet missions to Jupiter and Saturn could never go beyond the Vu-Graph stage.
The Venera landings were a nice engineering feat as far as getting back a few pictures before the environment destroyed the landers, but they weren't terribly useful from a scientific standpoint. That NASA never tried Venus landers was probably because it was deemed not worth it to just get back some pictures for about an hour and radar mapping of the planet was the approach taken instead (the Soviets really had no other option but to land since their technology wasn't up to radar mapping Venus).
No they weren't, the Pioneer Venus probes did that a good 7 years earlier.
Quote from: plutogno on 01/31/2018 06:41 pmas far as I know, the only mission that was developed beyond the basic idea was the YuS Jupiter flyby and small perihelion solar probe. I was able to find a detailed description of it, which I used for my book "Robotic Exploration of the Solar System - part 2". IIRC the same source was used for an article in Quest a few years ago.i'll try to recover it then! where can i find the books?anyway i suppose the main problem was rocketry? i head the feeling while reading around, that planetary probes by the URSS were very massive usualy and one for Jupiter would have needed something bigger that never was fully developed
Low resolution radar altimetry, though, not SAR as Venera did.
