Thirty five years ago yesterday , we could only imagine the view from the control surface of another world . But Russia ’s Venera 9 probe changed all that , glow back the first ever photograph of another planet—25 million geographical mile away .
By 1975 , the moon was no longer a frontier . It had been landed on , hopped across , take apart , filmed , photographed , and dug into . The next step was n’t the diminutive rock ‘n’ roll orbiting us , but a real , giant planet , just like our own . Russia congeal its sights on Venus — our closest cosmic neighbour , despite being tens of millions of Admiralty mile off .
We ’d been looking at Venus for hundreds of years — thousands , really , since it ’s often the burnished point in the at nighttime , easily seeable with the raw eye . But to be there in some sense , and to make something so remote and so foreign seem attainable , we needed eyes on the basis . And since nobody was in any shape to get off humans to do the job ( and sure wo n’t be for a recollective time ) , robot eyes had to do the trick .
The Venera 9 probe cater those robo - eyes , consisting of a massive , hugely heavy craft ( four times the heft of Russia ’s previous generation ) . It came in two part — a big , bulbous artificial satellite that channel info back to earth and measured the toxic cloud of Venus ( sulfuric acid and H sulfide , blech!)—and , more importantly , the lander . After parachuting to the rocky , volcanic surface of the planet , the Venera 9 ’s landing seedcase had to quickly chill itself against the 860 ° F open temps with coils pre - box coolant , allowing for only a light 53 minutes to operate before it went dead .
But before that point , Venera 9 snapped the money shoot : a 180 degree panoramic vista of Venus . Russia had hoped for a full 360 , though malfunction television camera foiled the plan . Nonetheless , 180 degrees of another major planet was more than enough . It revealed a sharp-worded , murky , rather unfriendly looking swath of terrain . NASA says the Russians identify it “ as bright as Moscow on a nebulous day in June . ” But no matter how tenacious , it was another planet , straight from the author , for the first time ever . We did n’t have to hypothesize or draw — Venus was n’t the kingdom of sci - fi anymore , but science . More recent Mars rovers have delivered imagery that greatly trumps Venera’s — but with decades of advance tech on their side . And whether high or low res , in color or not , both the Venera 9 and its successors are feed in our curiosity to not just see satellite as posters in a classroom , but to , as better we can , stand up there ourselves .
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