How Humanity Captured the First Photos From Venus and Survived Its Extreme Conditions

Okay, take a couple of seconds and look at this photo. Stones, dust, some tattered piece of metal in the frame. At first glance, it looks like an ordinary construction site on a cloudy day. But here's the thing. Outside, 1982. Before you is the Venera 13 landing capsule, and behind its walls is the real Venus. a hellish 460° and a pressure 90 times that of Earth. Imagine this thing being thrown into a fiery furnace and being squeezed with such force that it's like it's lying on a kilometer-long ocean floor. According to the plan, they had 32 minutes to take a panorama, take a soil sample,

and transmit the data to the ground before all the electronics inside burned to the ground. That is, the timing is just a bit too tight. And the number 13 in the name is not just for beauty. Before that, there were 12 more, let's say, less successful attempts. The Moon was the epicenter of the space race, but Sovok wasn't just betting on it. They also hoped for Venus and Mars. The first Venus probe was actually launched back in 1961, eight years before the Americans took the lunar crown. By the way, the chief designer behind all this was Sergey Korolev. It was his team that designed the first Venusian spacecraft, trying to find a way through the unknown.

Besides, it was easier to fly there than to Mars, and the heavy rockets of that time were literally created for this task. The clouds around the planet were so dense that it was simply impossible to see anything through a telescope. Scientists hoped to pull out a lucky ticket and seriously believed that they would find tropical forests, oceans of soda, or entire seas of crude oil there. If they knew that a boiling acidic hell awaited them below, no one would be in such a hurry to go there. In 1962, the American Mariner 2 shattered these fantasies.

It turned out that the surface itself was hotter than 400°. But there was another problem. They knew the temperature, but measuring the pressure from orbit was virtually impossible. As a result, the engineers found themselves, to put it mildly , in a complete mess. They designed the descent capsule without any idea of the real physical exertion. Back on February 12, 1961, Venera1 successfully launched into deep space. But during the flight, radio communication died and this now silent probe flew past the target. After that, the devices began to be refined and modernized. For example, in late 1965, Venera 3 corrected its course and on March 1, 1966, for the first time in human history, crashed directly into another

planet. There was only one problem. The connection was lost on approach. The electronics fried from overheating right there in space. Therefore, we did not receive a single byte of data from Venus itself. They learned their lesson. The cooling system was redesigned and in 1967, Venera 4 finally reached the planet alive. The device was packed with security systems to the brim. The antenna was actually fixed to a real sugar castle. In case the device falls into the ocean. The idea is truly brilliant. Dry sugar holds the latch tightly, but as soon as it gets wet, it dissolves and releases the spring. But there was no ocean.

The capsule dives into the clouds, transmitting data back, but with each kilometer down, the atmosphere squeezes it harder and harder. Even at high altitude, the device simply flattens. The next reinforced Venus 5 and dived deeper, but the pressure did not spare them either. However, these three suicide bombers were able to complete the main task. They found out what the atmosphere is actually made of. It turned out that it contained over 90% carbon dioxide. It acts exactly like a lid on a pot. The gas lets the sun's heat in, but rigidly blocks its radiation back into space. It was this uncontrolled greenhouse effect that heated the surface to almost 470°. All this gas pressed down on the planet

so much that the pressure jumped to a crazy 90 atmospheres. Conventional methods were powerless here. There was only one way out: to throw an armored deep-sea vehicle into this hell. Venus's exit is seven. Having abandoned the old drawings, they created a titanium sphere with a kind of wild margin of safety, as if they were preparing to dive into the Mariana Trench. Well, or to Venus. All unnecessary scientific instruments were stupidly thrown away just so that this armored bowling ball would survive until it hit the ground. December 1970. The probe dives into the atmosphere, and at the finish line everything goes

awry. The parachutes worked fine on previous missions, but no one had ever gone this deep. In the lower layers, the DSB system. What exactly happened there? Mystery. Maybe the parachute broke from the hellish pressure, or maybe the system malfunctioned. The fact is undeniable. The sphere falls at breakneck speed, hits the ground hard, and everything is silent. The connection disappears. There is panic on the ground. Well, they arrived, crashed again. It looked like another painful fiasco. But the tape recorders at the ground station worked according to protocol and continued to record the empty noise of the airwaves. And when they ran this film through filters and

cleaned up the cosmic noise, they found something incredible. The probe is not dead. Amidst this radio noise, a faint and weak signal was detected, which lasted continuously for a full 23 minutes. Apparently, the landing was so hard that the station simply tipped over on its side. The antenna was turned away from the ground, so the signal essentially came through as a whisper. Venus Seven did not send any photos. There were simply no cameras on it, but it transmitted numbers from the very bottom. Somewhere around 475° and about 90 atmospheres. They proved that it was possible to land there and transmitted a

signal. Now it was just a matter of figuring out how to make the hardware last longer and deciding whether it was even worth dragging the camera into this hell. At the time of the launch of Venus8, the roulette game was over. Knowing the exact pressure, they made the armor thinner, and the saved weight was used for scientific equipment and a survival system. So, how do you keep electronics from boiling at 470°? A regular air conditioner here is next to a light bulb. It is unrealistic to dump heat outside, because it is literally hotter there than inside. So they made a reversible thermos. The probe is pre-cooled and wrapped in powerful thermal insulation, and capsules with special salt are packed inside.

The trick is that when heat starts to penetrate inside, the salt starts to melt, and the melting process itself absorbs a tremendous amount of heat. While the salt melts, the air inside hardly heats up. This is a timeless refrigerator, but it saves the appliances a precious half hour to operate. As a result, Venera 8 lasted on the surface for a full 50 minutes. And on board it was a photomotor. You see, they planned to send cameras next, but no one knew what the lighting would be like, and what if there were even shackles under these kilometer-high clouds. If you can't see your own hand in front of your face, you won't be able to film anything without

massive spotlights, and lugging them around is a hell of a lot of extra weight. However, the sensor confirmed that light was reaching the surface. The natural lighting there is quite enough for high-quality photography. The light level is comparable to a very cloudy day or twilight on Earth. So finally we could take cameras and see with our own eyes what kind of planet this was. In 1975, Venera 9 and Venera 10 were launched. And this new generation wasn't just an armored titanium core. It was a giant, bizarre-looking hippopotamus. To keep this monster from getting fried on the way down, we had to get creative.

You say, "Just use a big parachute and descend smoothly." But where is the point? If the descent takes too long, all the cooling salt inside will melt before you even touch the surface. Therefore, at an altitude of about 50 km, they shoot off the parachute. The station falls through the atmosphere, slowed down by a flat aerodynamic shield, which works flawlessly in this thick CO2 soup. But it still hits the ground at a speed of about 25 km/h. To prevent the electronics from being crushed by the impact, a special deformation ring was attached to the bottom. It works exactly like the crumple zone in your car during an accident.

The ring simply crumples, absorbing all the force of the impact, and the filling remains completely intact. Now about the cameras. You can't just slide the camera itself out. its delicate electronics would burn out immediately, so it is safely hidden and the probe looks at the world from inside an armored thermos through a special heat-resistant periscope. Inside, a mechanical scanner rotates, reading the landscape in thin vertical stripes step by step. Due to the specific inclination of the scanner and the complex geometry of the field of view, the final panoramas are curved and distorted. And to prevent the periscope glass from becoming covered with soot on the way down, it is

hermetically sealed with a metal lid. The scheme is simple: land, blow up the protective cover and let the scanner calmly collect the frame in strips. So, October 1975. Venera 9 lands, shoots off its lens cap, and transmits the first-ever photograph taken from the surface of another planet. Just look, no tropical jungle. no ferns and no oceans of soda water, just a pile of simple rocks, some gravel, and a piece of that same landing ring with its teeth at the bottom of the frame. Shortly after, Venera 10 lands and sends back a picture from a different point. And there you can already see flat stone slabs, looking like giant pancakes made of frozen lava.

Geologists on Earth are opening champagne. Hypotheses and dry numbers on paper are one thing. And completely different. When the rocky landscape of another planet comes to life in front of you. With these first shots in hand, the stakes skyrocketed. Everyone wanted full- color photos and a normal chemical analysis of these elements and stones. Spoiler: from now on, everything will go in one place. In 1978, VNR-11 and Venera-12 were launched. The plans were to take the first color panoramas and finally dig a soil sample straight from the ground for chemical analysis. An umbrella travels millions of kilometers. It delicately passes through the atmosphere, gently settles. All systems are normal. Earth sends a command to shoot off the

camera covers, but they don't shoot off either on Venus 11 or Venus 12. The hellish pressure squeezed them so hard that the pyro cartridges simply couldn't handle it. The lenses were still looking straight at the back of the piece of metal, and in addition, the Soil Drill also said: "Oh, come on!" And I couldn't take a sample. The rest of the equipment worked flawlessly, without any issues. But for those who dreamed of colorful panoramas and the chemistry of rocks, it was an epic failure. Engineers set about redesigning all these mechanisms so that next time they would work like a steel structure and without problems. And then comes March 1982. Venus 13. We

return to the same frame from the beginning of the video, where only now you understand why every second was worth its weight in gold. The probe is landing. The moment of truth: the pyrotechnics go off. And this time the lids do fly off. The camera starts scanning and does it very intelligently. She shoots the same landscape through red, blue, and green filters with a target for color calibration in the frame. When they brought these layers together on the ground, they got the first-ever color panorama of Venus. Briefly about quality. Those clear images you Google today are not newspaper clippings from the time. Many years later, independent researcher Don Mitchell took the raw telemetry from the old tapes and reprocessed it. This guy

meticulously cleaned up the radio noise, merged the footage, and calibrated everything correctly. Yes, where data was lost, the gaps had to be carefully filled in using computer algorithms. And its aligned horizon is simply a projection to make it easier for our eyes to perceive the picture. By the way, if you heard rumors that years later someone spotted a crawling scorpion in these photos, that's a lie. These are literally just artifacts, cameras, and moving parts of the probe itself. No secret aliens. Or, you know, maybe scientists are just as silent about it as fish. Well, whatever it is, let's move on. You wo n't get far with pretty pictures. To understand what a planet is made of,

chemical analysis is needed. I remind you, it's 500° overboard, and the pressure is enough to crush metal. Inside is a refrigerated thermos with delicate electronics. You did n't just have to dig into the soil, you had to somehow pull the sample into the probe without letting the Venusian hell follow you there. The drill bites into the rock, takes a handful of soil, and pulls it into the chamber through an insanely complex system of vacuum locks. There, the wild external pressure is isolated and the sample is placed under an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. He scans the rock right in place, deep inside the red-hot apparatus. And this wild scheme really works.

It turns out that the local rock has a chemical composition similar to basalt. Venera 13 encountered rock rich in potassium. But the next station found a chemical analogue of thuleite basalts, similar to those that lie at the bottom of Earth's oceans. It was simply a cosmic breakthrough. The chemical analysis of the stones was done directly on another planet. According to the plan, Venera 13 was supposed to last in this oven for some 32 minutes, but it survived and sent data for a full 127 minutes. She worked on the surface for over two hours. Immediately after that, Venera 14 lands and delivers the most comical story of the entire program.

Perfect fit. The drill is working. Those damn camera covers are finally flying off. But there was another gadget on board. Penetrometer. Essentially, a mechanical paw that was supposed to extend on a spring, hit the ground, and measure its physical elasticity. The paw extends, slams down, and hits the camera lid, which has just flown away. [snorting] Out of the vast planet, the device hit its own part. It sounds like a joke, but in the end, the Soviet probe perfectly measured the strength of the Soviet lens cap on the surface of another world. But even this facap couldn't spoil the overall picture. They ripped out

these color frames and hacked the chemical composition. Mission accomplished. Two hours on the surface. This is a dump truck. But the umbrella essentially sticks in one place until it dies. Scientists wanted to see a bigger picture of how the planet works. First, they set about mapping with Venera 15 and 16. They didn't even bother with landing, they just hung in orbit and used radar to draw the first normal topographic maps. But the real hit was the Vega project in 1985. The name combined Venus and Gale. The engineers came up with a really cool multi-turn maneuver. The main ship leaves the lander on Venus, after which the station uses the planet's gravity like a giant slingshot, launching itself into deep space for a historic interception of Comet Hale. As the

descent vehicle rapidly breaks through the atmosphere, a clever compact device separates from it, which simply deploys and inflates a balloon of impressive size in flight. This balloon experiment was a joint development with the French, and the signals from these balloons were monitored by a massive network, an international network of radio telescopes, including stations in France and the United States. This ball hovered at an altitude of about 55 km. where the pressure and temperature are much closer to winter conditions. So while the descent device below worked for about an hour and got fried, the balloon flew in hurricane winds, measuring the local weather on the fly. Almost 48 hours of

weather data from another planet. I take off my hat. Through flattened bodies and stuck lens caps, humanity finally got to the bottom of the truth. No jungles, no oceans, just a carbon dioxide oven, 90 atmospheres of pressure, and red-hot basalt. Many people ask, why the hell did we stop flying to Venus? Look, orbital and flyby missions continued. Conspiracy theorists love stories about someone driving us out of there. Car wash. The reality is much more boring. Each such descent required a colossal amount of resources. And when they finally got color photos and figured out the

soil chemistry, building even more sophisticated submersibles that would survive for an hour or two or longer didn't yield enough new information to justify such a gigantic effort. They have already answered the main questions. So scientific priorities have changed. Look at this photo again. Every pixel on this screen has a price. Imagine how much they had to redo and bring to their senses after previous failures just to get that damn lid to fly off. It took 20 years of trial and error, crushed titanium, and fried electronics. And all this for those few hours on the surface. They truly managed to conquer the most brutal world in the solar system.

Even if it's just for two