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Exactly 50 Years Ago, Venera 7 Became the First Spacecraft to Land on Another Planet
Several Soviet missions landed on Venus and sent back pictures
On the 15th of December 1970 something momentous happened. The Venera 7 spacecraft landed on the surface of Venus, becoming the first human-made object to land on another planet. The landing only confirmed what everyone already knew: Venus was a forbidding place.
The view that scientists had of Venus had not always been like this. In the 19th and early-20th centuries, many people had very romantic notions of the planet. Venus was considered a virtual twin of our own planet Earth by early astronomers. In their imagination, it was a lush, tropical world full of exotic plants and animals.
However, when the instruments got better in the mid-20th century, the harsh reality emerged. Venus is Earth’s twin but from hell. The atmospheric pressure on the surface is 92 times the sea-level pressure on Earth. The temperature gets up to over 500 degrees Celsius. Its atmosphere is ruled by what has been described as a runaway greenhouse effect.
