I often work with the programmatic manipulation of images and 3d environments in my work at an engineering firm. Out of pure curiosity I was wondering about the Venera mission data format. I read that the landers sent data transmissions and that images were included.
I wanted to understand the data format but can find very little information. Was the image sent as a mosaic of pixels in some way? Was it effectively a television image broadcast on a different frequency (as with TIROS I)? Searching for answers has me trying to understand how magnetic tape is used to store image data as a possible way to understand what the thinking would have been.
I came across this, http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc1989/pdf/1024.pdf but it says very little.
Sending images over the local phone network, once slow and pixelated, seemed to take a decade before it worked right on our phones. How did the Russians manage this from Venus?