Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Union launched 18 probes to Venus as part of the Venera and Vega space programs. Of these, ...

Editor’s note: This story was originally published Aug. 26, 2020. It was updated May 9, 2025, with details of the failed mission Kosmos-482. The Pioneer and Voyager probes the United States sent to ...

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Venera 13, a Soviet spacecraft, was the first lander to transmit color images from the surface of Venus. Although other landers arrived before and after it, pictures from Venera 13 are more widely ...

Beginning at the dawn of the Space Age in the late 1950s, the Soviets worked to design and construct a series of Venus probes. And for almost 30 years, they built and flew the interplanetary ...

Forty-five years ago today (Aug. 17), the then-Soviet Union launched Venera 7, a spacecraft that would eventually become the first probe ever to send data from the surface of Venus, if only for a few ...

There is no place like Earth, but there may have been billions of years ago. Fifty years ago on March 27, 1972, Venera-8, a Soviet atmospheric space probe and lander scoped out the surface of our ...

When we speak about the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that took place in the second half of the 20th Century, we often focus on the moon missions. There were, however, various other ...

__1966: __ The Soviet probe Venera 3 successfully lands on the surface of Venus. It's the first time anything man-made makes contact with an extraterrestrial surface beyond the Moon. The Soviet Union ...