You may have seen in the news last month that we had to keep our heads down as a piece of ancient Russian space junk was going to fall back to Earth with most of the world in the possible landing zone, including us. It finally plummeted harmlessly into the Indian Ocean on 10th May. Phew!

This was one of the 35,000 bits of debris bigger than 10cm orbiting the Earth waiting to eventually re-enter and hopefully burn up in the atmosphere. But every year about 160 larger objects come back to earth as uncontrolled re-entries. This particular object was a section of the Soviet Kosmos 482 spacecraft launched in March 1972 as an unmanned mission to land on the planet Venus. After launch the rocket malfunctioned and it broke into pieces with remaining bits orbiting the Earth with some already having re-entering and burning up in 1981.

This module that finally succumbed to Earth’s gravity last month after 53 years of circling our planet was the 1m diameter 500kg section that was originally due to land by parachute on the surface of Venus in the early 1970s. Soviet scientists designed this lander to withstand the extremely harsh conditions on Venus. The surface temperature of 477 deg C that would melt lead makes this the hottest planet in our solar system. The intense air pressure is 90 times more than ours which is the equivalent of diving down 3,000 metres in the ocean. The atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen and is full of corrosive sulphuric acid clouds that blocks our view of the surface creating the “Greenhouse Effect” that causes the extreme temperatures. This little spacecraft was well designed to cope with hurtling through Venus’ hostile atmosphere and landing so coming back to Earth would be a piece of cake. Unfortunately it landed on the wrong planet!

So, this attempt to get to Venus failed. However, of the 46 missions (including “fly-bys” and landers) mainly by the US and Soviet Union with some from Japan and Europe, the Russian programme has had most success. From 1961 to 1984 the Venera Missions 1 to 14 achieved several firsts: First object to impact another planet in 1966; First to measure another planet’s atmosphere in 1967; First to transmit from the surface in 1970; Measured light levels; First colour images in1982; First soil sample 1982; Mapping in 1983. The landers of Venera Missions 9 to 16 had to be built like tanks and weighed 5 tons. The planned design life of Venera 13 was 32 minutes. It survived for 127 minutes and took the first photo of the surface and first recording of sounds from another planet. If you want to see Venus this month look east at 4am before the Sun gets up and the bright “Morning Star” will be there looking like a little half moon through a small telescope.

Glynn Bennallick