15 December 1970: Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 successfully lands on Venus, the first successful soft landing on another planet.

13 comments

  1. Venera 7 (Венера-7, lit. ’Venus 7′) was a Soviet spacecraft, part of the Venera series of probes to Venus.

    When it landed on the Venusian surface on 15 December 1970, it became the first spacecraft to soft land on another planet and the first to transmit data from there back to Earth.

  3. Venera 7 was launched on 17 August 1970 at 05:38:22 UT into an Earth parking orbit and then from a Tyazheliy Sputnik towards Venus.

    Two mid-course corrections were made, on 2 October and 17 November. The lander probe was allowed to cool to -8 degrees C before atmospheric entry. The Venera 7 probe separated from the bus and entered the nightside atmosphere of Venus on December 15, 1970 at 04:58:44 UT. After aerodynamic braking, the top hatch was blown and the parachute system was deployed at about 60 km altitude. The capsule antenna was extended, and signals return commenced.

    Six minutes later the parachute ripped, and then collapsed, leaving the probe to fall towards the surface for another 29 minutes. The probe impacted on the Venus surface at 05:34:10 UT at about 17 meters/sec and the signals weakened, reached full strength for about one second, and then seemingly ceased.

    Later analysis of the recorded radio signals revealed that the probe had survived the impact and continued transmitting a weak signal for another 23 minutes. It is believed that the spacecraft may have bounced upon impact and come to rest on its side, so the antenna was not pointed towards Earth.

    The pressure sensor had failed during the descent, but the temperature sensor showed a steady reading of 475 C at the surface, and a pressure of 92 bar with a wind of 2.5 meters/sec was extrapolated from other measurements.

    The probe provided information about the surface of Venus, which could not be seen through a thick veil of atmosphere. The spacecraft definitively confirmed that humans cannot survive on the surface of Venus, and excluded the possibility that there is any liquid water on Venus.

  6. I like the lasted sentence on Wiki:

    *”The spacecraft definitively confirmed that humans cannot survive on the surface of Venus, and excluded the possibility that there is any liquid water on Venus.”*

  7. I love the term ‘soft landing’ because that means that every other spaceship that crashed into the planet was also counted as a ‘landing’.

  8. Can the comments please leave the cold war behind? You are fueling the fire that we did not light. Europe is about a siblinghood of people, please act that way.

  9. Always blows my mind reading about the soviet space race. Couple of decades before they were a backwards agrarian society and all of a sudden here they are, winning the space race in every way (except the moon landing, which was the goal) against the US. I wonder how they built up all that knowledge in such a short timespan.

  11. Venus is actually a far more interesting planet to explore than, say, Mars. It has a dense, turbulent atmosphere, geological activity and a size and gravity similar to that of Earth.

    And yet over the last few decades we’ve sent what must be dozens of space probes to Mars, with dozens more to come, and only a handful to Venus, mostly by the Soviet Union.

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