Venera 7 sent the first signal from the surface of another planet
On this day · 15 December 1970
A Soviet probe survived a brutal plunge onto Venus and beeped back from the surface, a first no machine had ever managed.
On December 15, 1970, the Soviet probe Venera 7 dropped through the crushing Venusian sky and became the first spacecraft to transmit data from the surface of another planet. Its parachute tore during descent, and the lander slammed down at roughly 16.5 meters per second, bouncing onto its side.
Engineers nearly missed the triumph. The signal seemed to die on impact, and the craft was written off as a failure.
Only when radio astronomer Oleg Rzhiga reexamined the tapes did 23 minutes of faint surface signal surface from the noise.
That sliver of data was historic. It pinned Venus’s surface temperature at about 475 degrees Celsius under roughly 90 atmospheres of pressure, confirming a world hot enough to melt lead. Venera 7 turned Venus from a cloud-veiled mystery into a measured place, and proved a human-built machine could speak from the ground of another planet, however briefly, before the heat won.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
