August 17, 1970

Venera 7

Soviet Union launches Venera 7 toward Venus

The capsule that left Baikonur on 17 August 1970 was built to survive 180 atmospheres and 540 °C — far more than Venus would actually ask of it.

05:38:22 UT, site 31

Venera 7 lifted off at 05:38:22 UT on 17 August 1970 from NIIP-5 launch site 31 — now generally called the Baikonur Cosmodrome — aboard an 8K78M Molniya launch vehicle.

The launch put the 1,180-kilogram spacecraft out of Earth orbit and onto an interplanetary trajectory toward Venus.

A bus and a pressure vessel

The spacecraft paired a cruise bus carrying solar-wind and cosmic-ray detectors with a hardened lander of about 500 kilograms.

The lander's instruments were spare: a resistance thermometer and an aneroid barometer. Its structure was rated to 180 atmospheres and 540 °C.

The twin that never left Earth orbit

Getting out of Earth orbit was the part that had to work that morning. An almost identical spacecraft, Kosmos 359, launched five days later but never escaped Earth orbit.

Veneras 4, 5 and 6 had already returned atmospheric data from Venus, but none of them transmitted after reaching the surface.

The capsule launched on 17 August did: on 15 December 1970 Venera 7 returned 22 minutes 58 seconds of signal from the Venusian surface, the first data returned from the surface of another planet.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The August 17 launch date and time are well documented. Uncertainty concerns the later landing: NASA describes the capsule as 'quite likely' having tipped onto its side, and parachute collapse and antenna orientation remain reconstructions rather than directly observed facts.