Olga Vladimirovna Nikolaeva

Olga Vladimirovna Nikolaeva (Russian: Ольга Владимировна Николаева; 1941–2000) was a Soviet and Russian planetary geochemist and planetologist. Her work concerned the geology, geochemistry and mineralogy of Venus, especially interpretations of Soviet Venera and Vega lander measurements.

Nikolaeva was a researcher at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, where she worked on comparative planetology and the interpretation of planetary-surface data. The Venusian feature Nikolaeva Patera was named in her honour by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. In 1988 she was one of the authors of "Comparative Planetology", an article in the Soviet historical-astronomical volume Istoriko-astronomicheskie issledovaniia.

Venera lander studies

Nikolaeva was among the Soviet researchers who interpreted data returned from the Venera missions. She co-authored the 1977 Geological Society of America Bulletin paper on the surface of Venus as revealed by Venera 9 and Venera 10. She also co-authored work on albedo and colour properties of the Venusian surface as observed from Venera 13 data.

In 1983 Nikolaeva was one of the authors of a Science paper using close-up panoramic images from Venera 13 and Venera 14 to examine whether some layered rocks on Venus might be sedimentary rather than volcanic in origin. Burba credited her with defining arachnoids as a specific class of endogenic geological structures on Venus. She then co-authored a Magellan-based study of the Venera 8 landing-site region, combining morphological and geochemical considerations.

In the 1990s Nikolaeva published studies of potassium, uranium and thorium systematics in planetary materials. A 2023 review in Space Science Reviews noted that felsic compositions for the Venera 8 and Venera 13 sites had been considered by Nikolaeva on the basis of comparisons with terrestrial arc rocks, and cited her 1990, 1995 and 1997 work in that context. In her last published paper, with Alexey A. Ariskin, she used K-U-Th constraints to argue that the available Venus surface measurements were not explained by several earlier petrogenetic models for Venus basalts.

Legacy

The Venusian feature Nikolaeva Patera was named in Nikolaeva's honour. The name was approved by the International Astronomical Union in 2006.

Selected publications