Venera 9

Key facts

Mission & specifications

Mission

Venera 9 gave humanity its first look at the surface of another planet. Venus is the hardest world in the inner Solar System to stand on: beneath its perpetual clouds the surface is hot enough to melt lead, nearly 470 degrees Celsius, and crushed under an atmosphere ninety times denser than Earth's. Earlier Soviet Venera probes had reached the surface but sent back no pictures. On 22 October 1975, after a four-month journey, the Venera 9 lander parachuted and braked through the suffocating atmosphere, touched down on a slope strewn with sharp-edged rocks, and survived for fifty-three minutes in that inferno before its electronics failed. In that brief window it transmitted the first photograph ever taken from the surface of another planet — a single black-and-white panorama of a rocky, surprisingly well-lit landscape stretching to a clear horizon, the ground littered with flat stones. It was a primitive image by any standard, grainy and narrow, but it was historic: for the first time, human beings could look at the ground of another world as if standing on it. Venera 9 and the landers that followed remain the only spacecraft ever to send pictures from the surface of Venus, a place so hostile that nothing has survived there for more than about two hours.

1. 1975Venera 9 sets out for VenusLaunch

   A Soviet probe begins the four-month journey to Venus.

2. 1975First image from another planetMilestone

   The lander survives 53 minutes on the searing surface and sends the first photograph ever taken from the surface of another world.

3. 1975Lost to the heatMission end

   The lander's electronics fail in the ~470 C heat after less than an hour.

Images

Images from open archives · credit shown per image