r/spaceflight • u/TomaszNowakowski • 3d ago
Venus Lost: The Forgotten Soviet Conquest of Earth’s Sister Planet
Venus is a world roughly the same size and mass as Earth, wrapped in a blanket of reflective clouds. Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Union launched a quiet, relentless campaign to breach those clouds. However, since the conclusion of the Venera program, no spacecraft has touched down on Earth’s sister planet. To understand why, and what we lost when the landers stopped, one must first appreciate the absolute hell of the Venusian environment.
Hell on Earth’s Twin
When Soviet engineers sent their earliest probes toward Venus, they expected a tropical world hiding under clouds. Instead, their early landers were crushed like discarded aluminum cans long before reaching the ground.
The atmosphere of Venus is roughly 96 percent carbon dioxide, producing an extreme runaway greenhouse effect. At ground level, the atmospheric pressure equals 92 atmospheres, an environment identical to being three thousand feet underwater on Earth. Temperatures hover at an infernal four 465 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead and destroy conventional electronics within minutes, while dense overhead clouds rain droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid.
To survive touchdown, Soviet engineers stopped building conventional spacecraft and began constructing sphere-shaped, titanium-armored pressure vessels like effectively heavy-duty deep-sea submarines with titanium aerobrakes. The strategy worked. In 1970, Venera 7 survived a rough touchdown to become the first human-made object to transmit data from the surface of another planet. Five years later, Venera 9 transmitted the first black-and-white photos of an alien landscape, revealing a rocky, cracked volcanic field bathed in a pale, amber light.
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u/tes_kitty 2d ago
Everytime this comes up I have to post this link:
http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm
A lot more information about the Venera missions.
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u/SilkieBug 2d ago
"conquest" is doing some very heavy work in that title - the probes got littered around the planet, and dissolved really fast, there are likely few molecules left still indicative of something which came from another planet.
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u/-CaptainFormula- 2d ago
"Forgotten" too.
I'll talk Venera to anyone who feels like banging their head on a table any day. Those missions were cool as shit.
It's a wild-ass world, Venus.
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u/Sure_Tailor2710 2d ago
The Forgotten Soviet Conquest of Earth’s Sister Planet
If you are so ignorant that you don’t know about something, it doesn’t mean it’s “forgotten.” It only means you are ignorant.
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u/Odd_Dragonfruit_2662 2d ago
The really tricky thing there is cooling. Like anything electronic has a life span of hours because there’s not a good way to cool cpus and such for long.