35 Years Ago Today We Got Our First Look into an Alien World [Techversaries]

Thirty five years ago yesterday, we could only imagine the view from the skin of another world. But Russia’s Venera 9 probe changed all that, beaming back the first ever photo of another planet-25 million miles away.

By 1975, the moon was now not a frontier. It were landed on, hopped across, analyzed, filmed, photographed, and dug into. Your next step wasn’t the tiny rock orbiting us, but a real, giant planet, similar to our own. Russia set its sights on Venus-our closest cosmic neighbor, despite being millions of miles away.

We’d been gazing Venus for hundreds of years-thousands, really, since it’s often the brightest point inside the at night, easily visible with the naked eye. But to be there in some sense, and to make something so distant and so foreign seem attainable, we would have liked eyes on the ground. And since nobody was in any shape to send humans to do the job (and likely won’t be for a while), robot eyes had to do the trick.

The Venera 9 probe provided those robo-eyes, together with an immense, enormously heavy craft (four times the heft of Russia’s previous generation). It came in two parts-a huge, bulbous orbiter that transmitted info back to earth and measured the toxic clouds of Venus (sulfuric acid and hydrogen sulfide, blech!)-and, more importantly, the lander. After parachuting to the rocky, volcanic surface of the planet, the Venera 9′s landing pod had to quickly chill itself against the 860°F surface temps with coils pre-packaged coolant, bearing in mind only a scant 53 minutes to operate before it went dead.

But before that point, Venera 9 snapped the cash shot: a 180 degree panoramic vista of Venus. Russia had hoped for a whole 360, though malfunctioning cameras foiled the plan. Nonetheless, 180 degrees of another planet was more than enough. It revealed a sharp, cloudy, rather unfriendly looking swath of terrain. NASA says the Russians described it ” as bright as Moscow on a cloudy day in June.” But despite how dour, it was another planet, straight from the source, for the first time ever. We didn’t need to hypothesize or draw-Venus wasn’t the area of sci-fi anymore, but science. More moderen Mars rovers have delivered imagery that greatly trumps Venera’s-but with decades of advanced tech on their side. And whether high or low res, in color or not, both the Venera 9 and its successors are feeding our curiosity to not just see planets as posters in a classroom, but to, as best we are able to, stand there ourselves.

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This post is tagged: eyes on the ground, hundreds of years, hydrogen sulfide, million miles, panoramic vista, sulfuric acid