 It's hard to land on Venus, but it's not impossible. The Soviet Union did it four times with the Vanera Landers and that's what we're talking about today on Vintage Space. In my last video about a 1966 proposal to send a manned mission to Venus using Apollo Air Hardware, a lot of people said that it would be completely impossible to send men to Venus. They pointed to the Vanera Landers as proof. The Vanera Landers lasted about an hour on the surface of Venus before succumbing to the hellish environment. The absolutely insane temperatures up to 900 degrees centigrade and crushing atmosphere that's about 92 times as heavy as we feel our atmosphere on the Earth. But the Vanera Landers were by no means failures. They actually accomplished exactly what they set out to do and they did it spectacularly. So let's look at what they actually did. When we think about a race in space, we tend to think about the race to land a man on the surface of the Moon. But there were other things that both the Soviet Union and the United States were after to score us first during the Apollo era. Among them, the Soviet Union wanted to be the first nation to send back a picture from the surface of another planet, and that planet was Venus. The program that saw this goal realized was the Vanera program, and the first mission to attempt a landing and take that picture was Vanera 9. Vanera 9 launched on June 8th of 1975 on a proton booster from the Soviet launch site at Tagore Tam. Four months later, it became the first spacecraft to enter into a permanent orbit around Venus. The lander separated from the orbiter and began its descent, sending information about the atmosphere back to the orbiter the entire time. The lander was actually designed to take advantage of Venus' atmosphere, specifically its dense clouds, as a braking mechanism so that it didn't need to use all parachutes and airbraking. The lander's bottom was flared with panels that both shielded the braking engine and also acted as an airbrake. 40 miles above the surface, three drogue parachutes deployed to pull out a small metallic parachute. That chute fell away about 31 miles above the surface, and from that point on, the thick atmosphere was enough to slow the lander. In final descent, a compressible, metal, donut-shaped landing cushion deployed to ensure a soft landing, aided by shock absorbers. Vanera 9 touched down on October 22nd of 1975, and transmission started immediately. Protective covers dropped away from the camera lenses that were shielded behind a nearly half-inch thick quartz window, but only one of the two cameras worked. And it turned out the lander actually touched down on a raised area, not a flat area. So instead of seeing a straight 360-degree panorama from Miranda lander, we actually see sort of half-circle looking down on the horizon. Temperatures rose steadily inside Vanera 9 from the moment it touched down on the surface, and by the time the internal temperature reached about 60 degrees centigrade, transmission ceased. But not before sending back a phenomenal image of the surface of Venus. These surface images of Venus might not be the most impressive we've gathered of all of space images, but they're some of my favorites because they're just sort of incredible what a spacecraft had to go to to get it. What do you guys think about it? For a little bit more on the Vanera program, but mostly some fantastic pictures of Venus and the surface of Venus, check out my latest post over on Vintage Space. It's linked below. And for Vintage Space every day of the week, follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space. And with new episodes going up every Tuesday and Friday, do not forget to subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.