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What the Soviets Actually Found on Venus
What the Soviets Actually Found on Venus
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Did you know that humans actually landed a probe on Venus? It was only active for less
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than an hour, but what it transmitted back shocked scientists. Here’s what it found.
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For most of the 20th century, Venus was the ultimate mystery
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for astronomers. We could track it and map its orbit… but the planet
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itself stayed sealed behind clouds. No one knew what waited on the surface.
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And then one man arrived with a darker possibility.
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In the 1960s, the American astronomer Carl Sagan shared the idea of a "runaway
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greenhouse effect." Sagan argued that Venus's air, full of carbon dioxide,
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trapped heat like a heavy wool blanket. This turned the planet into a planetary pressure
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cooker. His theory sparked scientific interest. Was Venus a burnt wasteland
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or something more? There was only one way to find out… we had to go there.
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Knowing that Venus was a planetary pressure cooker didn't stop the
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world's superpowers; it just raised the stakes.
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This was the height of the Cold War Space Race, a winner-takes-all contest that pitched the United
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States and Soviet Union head to head. The Soviets, under leaders like Nikita Khrushchev, saw space
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travel as a way to show off their technology and better the Americans. They had already surprised
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the world with Sputnik 1 in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s historic trip around the Earth in 1961.
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While the Americans were playing catch up, the Soviets eyed something bigger.
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Venus.
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It was closer than Mars - at its nearest approach just 24 million miles (38.6 million km) away. It
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was the perfect place to plant a flag. The Venera program - named after the Russian
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word for Venus - launched in 1961. Venera 1 was a bold attempt - a probe weighing over 1,400 pounds
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designed to fly by the planet and send back data. But just seven days after launch, contact was
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lost. The probe sailed past Venus at about 62,000 miles (99,779 km), returning nothing of use.
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Venera 2 broke on the way, its cooling system shutting down and cooking its own brain before it
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could get a single reading. These early failures showed a harsh truth: space travel was hard.
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These probes had to fly for months, alone and arrive perfectly… or they’d
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die instantly. Launch windows were tiny - only every 19 months - and the failure rate
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was huge. The Soviets started launching probes in pairs, because they had to.
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While the Soviets were regrouping, NASA took the chance with the Mariner program. Mariner
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1 went off course because of a single missing dash in its computer code and was blown up
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over the Atlantic. But its twin, Mariner 2, worked perfectly. Launched in August 1962,
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it completed the first successful planetary flyby in human history.
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During its 42-minute scan, Mariner 2 confirmed Sagan's worst nightmares.
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Surface temperatures were measured around 800 degrees Fahrenheit (426 Celsius) - hot
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enough to melt lead. It also found that the atmosphere was a thick,
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crushing soup of carbon dioxide with no protective magnetic field. NASA analyzed
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the results and decided to pass on Venus. Their focus shifted to the Moon and Mars.
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But Venus wasn’t done… and neither were the Soviets.
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They viewed Venus as theirs. In 1965, they launched Venera 3, aiming not just for a flyby,
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but for an actual landing. During its journey, its radio failed but the probe's path was perfect. It
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crashed into Venus on March 1st, 1966, becoming the first human-made object to hit another planet.
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Venera 4, launched in June 1967, went further. It released a landing pod that
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used parachutes and sent data for 93 minutes as it drifted down. High up,
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the temperature was a pleasant, Earth-like summer day around 80°F (27°C).
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And then it got worse.
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But as the probe dropped, the environment turned into a scene from a horror movie.
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On Venus, the air is so thick it’s practically a liquid. As Venera 4 went down,
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the pressure began to build. At around 16 miles (26 km) above the ground, the signal stopped.
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The probe had been crushed like an empty soda can by the sheer weight of the air.
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The Soviets were stunned. Their probes weren’t strong enough.
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Venera 5 and 6 followed in 1969 to check these findings, and both were
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crushed the same way - lasting barely 50 minutes before being flattened. They did,
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however, discover that the winds on Venus travelled at up to 225 mph (362 kph) in
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the upper atmosphere and that the air was filled with drops of sulfuric acid.
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By 1970, the Space Race had changed.
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The U.S. had already put man on the Moon, taking the world's attention.
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The Soviets needed a win - and that win would be a soft landing on Venus. They
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redesigned their probes. Venera 7 had a strong titanium shell and foam to soak up the shock.
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The Soviets weren’t chasing science anymore… they were chasing survival.
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During the landing on December 15th, 1970,
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the parachute tore. The lander began to plummet fast, hitting the surface at about
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37 miles per hour (60 kph). This should've been the end. It should’ve died on impact…
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But it didn’t.
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The thick air - about 92 times the pressure of Earth at sea level - actually helped slow
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the fall just enough for the probe to survive. It bounced, tipped over,
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and landed on its side in the dirt. Against all odds, it sent data for 23 minutes.
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And no one could believe it.
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The ground temperature was a searing 887 degrees Fahrenheit (475 Celsius). The
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Soviets had just completed the first successful soft landing on another planet.
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Venera 8 followed in 1972, and confirmed that despite the clouds,
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sunlight actually reached the ground.
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And then… they saw it.
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If the probes wanted to survive longer,
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they needed to get to the surface faster. They used a new "air-braking" trick - a giant metal
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disk that used the thick air to slow the probe down without needing a parachute.
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Venera 9 touched down on October 22nd, 1975. It survived for 53 minutes, and in that time,
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it did something historic. It took the first-ever photograph of the surface. And
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it wasn’t life. It wasn’t water. It was a dead world - a bare landscape of broken volcanic
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rocks and dirt. The sky was a blurry, glowing orange from the thick CO2 scattering sunlight.
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Venera 10 landed a few days later on October 25th, showing smoother ground, likely old lava flows
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that had hardened into flat plates. These missions proved that Venus was a world of volcanoes - some
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of them possibly still active. The spacecraft above used radar to map the planet, finding huge
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mountains like Maxwell Montes, rising to 36,000 feet (10,973 meters), taller than Mount Everest.
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Then came Venera 13… and that would change everything.
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This was the ultimate Venus explorer, landing in March 1982. It took color
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photographs of the surface. It also carried a microphone to pick up background noise.
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The images showed a rusty, orange-brown landscape under a
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sickly yellow sky. Flat bedrock plates of basalt-like rock, loose regolith,
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and small angular rocks were scattered around the surface. The probe also recorded the first
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sound from another world - an eerie, low-pitched howl of the Venusian wind.
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Venera 13 also drilled into the surface, discovering a type of rock
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identical to tholeiitic basalt which makes up Earth’s ocean floor. The
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probe survived for 127 minutes - a record for surviving on the surface of Venus.
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Venera 14 landed nearby, but it wasn’t as successful. Its camera
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lens cap popped off - then landed directly where the soil-testing arm was supposed to
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touch down. Instead of measuring the hardness of Venus’s surface,
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the probe spent its entire 57 minute lifespan testing its own lens cap.
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After the mid-80s, the landings stopped. The Soviet Union was starting to have money problems,
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and the Venera program was becoming too expensive. They launched the Vega missions in 1984,
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which dropped balloons into the Venusian air. These balloons floated 33 miles (53 km) up,
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while being bombarded by 200 miles per hour (322 kph) winds in the super-rotating atmosphere.
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But as the USSR fell apart in 1991, so did the money for Venus exploration.
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NASA, meanwhile, had decided that Mars was a much better place to spend money. On Mars,
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a rover like Curiosity or Perseverance could last for ten years. On Venus, you could spend
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a billion dollars for a machine that dies in two hours. The math just didn’t add up.
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Why haven't we been back to the surface of Venus?
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Well, Venus is a nightmare for electronics. Most modern computer chips would break instantly
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due to the extreme heat. To build a rover that could survive for days,
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it would require high-heat electronics or carry huge cooling systems that would make the probe too
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heavy to fly. For now, the surface of Venus remains out of reach for human technology.
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So, what did the Soviets actually find?
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We learned that billions of years ago, Venus likely had liquid water oceans. It might have
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even had life. But because it’s closer to the Sun, a runaway greenhouse effect happened. The oceans
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dried up and the water vapor trapped more heat. Eventually, the carbon dioxide trapped in the
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rocks was baked out into the air. This created a loop that turned a paradise into a furnace.
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There’s no liquid water on Venus today. There’s no magnetic field to protect it from
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the solar wind. It’s an active, volcanic ghost planet with over 85,000 volcanoes identified.
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However, there is still some mystery.
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In 2020, scientists found a gas called phosphine in the Venusian clouds - a chemical that,
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on Earth, is often made by tiny living organisms. While people disagree about it, it suggests
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that even in this barren world, life might be present in the cooler, upper layers of the air.
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But Venus acts as a warning.
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It shows us exactly how easily a planet's climate can break. It tells us that the difference between
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a Blue Marble and a burnt wasteland is just a few degrees and a lot of carbon dioxide.
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NASA and Europe are planning new missions, VERITAS and DAVINCI,
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to head back to Venus in the late 2020s. They won't just be flying by;
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they'll be sampling the atmosphere with modern tools to uncover more of the planet’s secrets.
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But for now, the surface remains as the Soviets left it: a desolate, crushing inferno.
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Now go check out 50 Surprising Facts About Space You Didn't Know. Or click on this video instead.
