The Soviet Obsession With Venus Revealed

did you know that it's possible to land on Venus without a parachute or even a rocket engine this is a unique feature of the planet discovered by the Soviet Union 5 decades ago it was the result of a trial and error process that Finally Revealed the truth about the most interesting location in our solar system this is what the Soviets found when they landed on Venus and why they never went [Music] back venira is the Russian word for the planet Venus it's also a series of 16 missions that sought to understand discover and map out Earth's closest neighbor dating back to 1961 and extending all the way to 1985 the venira project was a series of space probes and satellites sent to Venus that would study the planet and gather more information ostensibly this was done for science but we can't ignore the political implications either one of many ambitious plays by the USSR to assert itself as a more capable actor during the Space Race while Mars tends to get all of the attention in the 21st century back in the day there was actually much more interest in studying Venus why is that well we can observe the surface of Mars through high powered telescopes on Earth so we had a pretty good idea that there wasn't a whole lot going on over there aside from a a minority of Fringe theories about canals on Mars it was generally accepted to be a dead Planet but Venus on the other hand presents a centuries old mystery all that we can see from Earth is an impenetrable unyielding cover of thick clouds So What Lies Beneath if Venus has clouds then it has a dense atmosphere unlike Mars which means that there could be life on Venus the closer proximity to the sun combined with the insulating Cloud layer would indicate that it must be hot on Venus a tropical climate that spans an entire Globe covered with dense rainforests that support all nature of alien insects and reptiles like a prehistoric Earth this was more plausible than the Martian Theory but even still was not widely regarded by the scientific community of the day the famous astronomer Carl Sagen had already popularized the notion that the Unbreaking cloud cover of Venus was indicative of a greenhouse effect that had gone wildly out of control and superheated the planet meaning that the world below the clouds would be nothing more than a scorched hellscape but there was only one way to find out as with all of the early milestones in the Space Race the Soviet Union was the first to make an attempt to study Venus up close the year was 1961 the Soviets built two probes venea 1 and venea 2 this was a common procedure in the first Decades of space exploration to launch missions in pairs because there was still a very high likelihood that one of them was going to fail you really have to appreciate the ambition of these primitive interplanetary flights with nothing more than an adding machine to guide them the Russian Engineers strapped a rocket engine to their probe loaded it on top of a ballistic missile called the r seven and set course for Venus then they let it rip and hoped for the best the good news is that both probes were able to fly within 100,000 km of Venus the bad news is that both probes experienced a full system failure before reaching their destination and therefore no usable data was returned then in 1962 the Americans succeeded where the Soviets had failed their Mariner 2 probe flew within 35,000 km of Venus and completed the first upclose observation of another planet during a 42-minute scan of Venus Mariner 2 gathered significant data on the venutian atmosphere and the surface from both the night and day side the findings confirmed Sagan's theory about the greenhouse effect Mariner 2's microwave radiometer indicated temperatures of up to 49° F or 237° C on the day side Mariner 2 also found that there was a dense Cloud layer that extended from 56 to 80 km above the surface based on this data NASA largely decided to pass on further exploration of Venus in the short term considering it an environment totally inhospitable for either man or machine so they switched Focus to the moon and Mars but the Soviets were less convinced they redoubled their efforts and prepared the second wave of venea probes they still had no idea just how bad things were about to get it's 1966 and the Soviets have built a bigger and tougher spacecraft for veneer 3 and 4 it's now weighing in at over 2,000 lb equipped with a variety of instruments like a barometer a radar altimeter gas analyzers thermometers and a detachable pod that would serve as a descent module the idea was that The Descent module would parachute down through the venutian atmosphere and take readings about the composition temperature and pressure all the way down to the surface in reality things got a little complicated venira 3 experienced another system failure along the way but the soviet's aim was true so the probes still managed to hit Venus like a bullet and slam right into the surface which became the first man-made object to ever crash into another planet the USSR actually scored a hatrick on impacting near Earth bodies they were the first to crash on the Moon Venus and Mars there's a lesson in there probably if you're going to fail do it historically right venir 4 in 1967 was the closest yet to a success story The probe made it all the way to Venus with all systems go and dropped the capsule down into the venutian atmosphere from here The Descent module successfully deployed its parachutes and drifted slowly down towards the surface this was the first spacecraft to ever collect measurements inside the atmosphere of another planet data returned by the probe showed something very interesting at high altitudes the atmosphere of Venus is very similar to Earth on a warm summer day perfectly hospitable temperature and pressure downright comfortable even but the lower the probe descends the more extreme the climate becomes not only ramping up in temperature but in atmospheric pressure as well it gets so bad that after 90 minutes of slow descent transmission from the probe goes dead it's widely believed that the capsule was simply crushed like a beer can by the density of the atmosphere so now we know that descending into Venus is like diving deep into the ocean which is a strange concept to wrap your head around that air could be so dense that it would crush a metal spacecraft with this new information the Soviets were nearly certain that their remaining venea 5 and six probes would have no chance of reaching the surface but they launched them anyway in the meantime NASA had launched another flyby mission to Venus with Mariner 5 in 1967 it wouldn't make contact with the planet but it got close enough to confirm what Venera 4 had experienced that the conditions on Venus Were Somehow even more extreme than what had been originally detected in the early 1960s with that in mind the Soviets launched fera 5 and six back to back in January 1969 both probes recorded less than an hour of data each before meeting the same crushing fate as their predecessor and yet the Soviet Union was not discouraged in their efforts they would simply build even bigger and even stronger probes and they were going to try again for their next round of veneer Landing attempts number seven and 8 the Soviets made two very key modifications for one The Descent module was built from a thicker metal with more insulation from an internal sphere of titanium to protect instruments from heat and padding to soften the blow from Impact and modification number two was pretty clever the engineers wanted to minimize the amount of time that the probe was exposed to the environment so they put an extra tie around the lines of the parachute this would stop the parachute from fully opening as the probe fell through the upper atmosphere then the material of the tie was designed to melt at a certain temperature that would allow the parachute to deploy at a lower altitude although venea 7's parachute did Deploy on August 17th 1970 it still didn't last very long the material somehow got ripped or it just straight up melted but either way the landing module ended up dropping Like a Rock reaching a terminal velocity of 61 kmph before bouncing off the venutian surface again based on that transmission The Observers back on Earth assumed that they were looking at yet another failure to reach the surface alive but that was not the case even with a busted up an antenna the Lander was sending back information and what venira 7 found would confirm scientists worst fears the temperature recorded at the surface showed 475° C or roughly 900° fahrenheit hot enough to melt lead and far too hot for any machine to operate reliably and yet the Soviets Were Somehow undeterred in 1972 they would try it all again with venira 8 miraculously this Mission would not face any technical difficulties along the way The Descent module touch down softly on the planet surface with all of its instruments intact and recorded for just less than 1 hour so by now we know that the temperature on Venus exceeds 900° the pressure on the surface is equivalent to 92 times that of the atmosphere on Earth which is comparable to being 1 km below water and if that wasn't enough the lower atmosphere is filled with with sulfuric acid which is the stuff inside a car battery now you would think all of this confirmed knowledge would finally deter even the most committed Engineers but the Soviet Union just didn't believe in quitting I mean until they literally quit being a union entirely overnight the whole wall coming down thing but we're not going there today where we are going is back to Venus because venira 8 revealed one last fact that was too good to pass up even with the dense cloud cover there's still enough sunlight reaching the surface of Venus to take a photograph for venea 9 the Soviets made a fundamental change to the probe's design you can see this just by looking at it there's some crazy stuff going on here The Descent capsule itself has been beefed up yet again we are now tipping the scales at nearly 5 metric tons but the standout features have to do with a new Landing procedure given everything that we now know about Venus we want to keep our probes exposure to the environment as minimal as possible and we also learned that even after being dropped accidentally and plummeting hundreds of meters vinea 7 still managed to function so what happens if we drop the probe intentionally this is what's going on with the two rings at the bottom is actually the landing gear or impact ring just a flat metal Circle connected to the main Body by a series of shock absorber legs and at the top is the new Arrow break this is how we land on Venus with no parachute required this thing that looks like a weird hat is all that's really needed to get the speed of the probe down low enough for a safe landing that's putting the incredibly thick atmosphere of Venus to work it behaves more like water than it does air it's very trippy also they did technically use a parachute just to slow the probe down in the upper atmosphere like to get it down to subsonic speed but the actual Landing itself was a freef fall straight into the ground from 47 km above the surface now now what about those cameras this is the first photograph ever taken of Venus it was captured on black and white film by veneer 9 in 1975 and what we're looking at is a field of broken Jagged rocks surrounded by a sand-like material it's not exactly breathtaking the photo is only interesting because it was taken on Venus but I still think it's pretty cool this is the view from veneer 10 an identical Lander that arrived just a few days later and now we are seeing flat ground with hardly any of those chunks of rock just the smooth top of what was probably once an ancient lava flow venira 11 and 12 were less eventful missions they failed to return any interesting photos due to lensc cap failures this was one of the tricks with Venus you have to protect the camera on the way down or it'll melt prematurely but then you have to rely on an automated system to reveal the lens which didn't always work venira 13 unlucky number but highly successful mission in the year 1981 this probe returned the first ever color photo of the venutian surface and it's one of my favorites again the surface around the Lander is just flat Sandy Rock but you can see just a touch of landscape beyond the probe landed near the edge of a cliff or the peak of a hill you can get a sense of depth that makes it all seem more real and more alien at the same time scenes like this should make every person appreciate the earth a little more as most planets and moons in the Galaxy probably look like Venus all of the ones that we've found anyway Barren lifeless rocks anyway you can also see the base of the Lander again here and what is the deal with those teeth they look almost purposefully brutalus but the teeth served an aerodynamic function metal teeth were added to the periphery of the impact ring in an effort to reduce Spin and oscillation experienced by previous missions 11 and 12 which could lead to a pretty rough Landing but that's not all the veneer could do the probe was also equipped with a drill and surface sample to analyze the venutian soil and what it found was a material very similar to a rock that we call tough on Earth it's essentially just solidified volcanic ash oh and one more thing venira 13 carried a microphone so we can listen to the sounds of Venus it's essentially just wind noise and the sound of the probe doing its thing but again like the photos there's something very spooky and alien about it veneer 14 was again pretty near identical it found another flat plane of these smooth rocks which were determined to be very similar to thetic Bass salt which is a volcanic rock that makes up most of the Earth's ocean floor and that was it that was the last time that a man-made object reached the surface of Venus there was some really cool stuff done with balloons but that's a whole other story what I want to dwell on here is why we never went back one very obvious reason would be that it's a lot of work and a lot of expense for relatively little payoff you can send a robot to Mars and it'll last for years whereas the longest of Vander ever made it was about 2 hours the venea program came to an end right as the Soviet Union itself was coming to an end leadership and priorities changed Russia went through a tough time in the 1990s we're also left with this Paradox whereas our technology becomes more advanced it also becomes more fragile in many ways the old Soviet Union was the perfect place to build a machine that would withstand Venus and we may have lost that style of craftsmanship in the pursuit of ever cheaper and more efficient manufacturing I saw an interview on TV the other day with an old NASA engineer and he was talking about the Voyager 1 probe he made the analogy that the computer on Voyager was about as capable as a pocket calculator of the 1970s today we can fit the computing power of an iPhone in our pocket but does anyone really believe that we could shoot an iPhone into space and have it still operating 40 years in the future Apple updates alone would make that impossible but there is a lot that we still have to learn from the past if we truly want to push our space exploration into the future

Channel: The Space Race

Views: 64,757

Keywords: venus, venera, soviet union, soviet space program, soviet venus landing, landing on venus, venus exploration, how to land on venus, venus science, planetary science, surface of venus, venera program, venera lander, photos of venus, photography on venus, images of venus, venus facts, ussr, soviet union space exploration, venera probe, space history, space exploration history, life on venus, russia venus, russian venus landing, russian space program, cccp, venus atmosphere

Id: ydibFhTuimY

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024