People rightly get emotional about the perceived humanity of the Mars rovers but I just have to go off for a moment about the Soviet Venera program of the 60s-80s and how it gets me feeling just as emotional.
I think part of the appeal of the Mars rovers is their longevity—they have stuck around far longer than their projected lifespans, occasionally performing little rituals that reinforce the connection between these robots and their human parents (eg. the “happy birthday” song).
In contrast, the final and most sophisticated Venera landers lasted barely 2 hours on the surface of Venus. Why? Venus is a fucking hellscape that’s like 850°F (454°C) on the surface, with an atmospheric pressure 95 times higher than Earth’s, cloaked in corrosive clouds. Despite these insane conditions, Soviet scientists and engineers sent 16 spacecraft to Venus.
They failed a lot. The first two probes didn’t even get there. Venera 3 made it all the way. On board it carried a variety of scientific sensors, and a set of Soviet medallions. It impacted the surface in March 1966, but its instruments failed long before it could send back anything relevant. It was pulverized by the pressure and melted down into slag by the heat.
A year later, a reinforced Venera 4 managed to send back the atmospheric data its sibling hadn’t been able to capture. It was the first spacecraft to take these measurements on another planet. As it descended down into the hell that it was analyzing (91°F...200°F...oh...346°F... 504°F...oh god), the probe cracked open at the top and was crushed before reaching the surface. Like an egg. Like a skull.
Due to the data it sent back, the mission was considered a success, but its engineers had actually hoped that it would have been able to endure and make a soft landing. They had designed it to survive even in the unlikely event that it landed in water, and had equipped it with a battery that would last up to 100 minutes. Initially did not want to accept that it had not reached the surface intact.
In 1970, Venera 7 was the first probe to succeed in landing, but not without its own struggles. Things were going well until just before touchdown, when its parachute failed. The probe hit harder than expected, but it was so incredibly overbuilt that this time its titanium skull did not crack, merely toppling over onto its side and throwing its transmitter out of alignment. It was presumed dead, but, as scientists would only realize weeks later, it fought on for another 23 minutes, transmitting a faint stream of data back to its home millions of miles away before succumbing to the temperature and pressure.
Into the 80s, the Soviet Union landed 6 more spacecraft on the surface of Venus. They took color photographs (the first from another planet), recorded sound, and analyzed the soil. They allowed us to pull back Venus’s poisonous veil and see something we were not designed to see. These later landers were rated to last only 30 minutes on the surface, but they generally doubled or tripled that time. Under stifling heat, toxic air, and immense pressure, they gave their best until they ultimately boiled away.
If Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, Venus is worse. The Mars rovers are like children you can watch grow up and slowly become more distant with age. The Venera probes/landers were children that their Soviet parents poured their time and energy and love into all the while knowing that they were going to be consumed in a blaze of glory turned miserable death. That their useful lifespans would be measured in mere minutes.
Maybe this is just me ascribing feelings that weren’t there to the engineers and anthropomorphizing the robots too much, I’m no scientist, but emotionally that is gut wrenching. When I first learned about these missions I cried. And not only because I feel for the spacecraft. This is also a story about a nation and culture that no longer physically exists (paralleling the landers themselves). Throwing a bunch of progressively more overbuilt stuff at a seemingly crazy task is one of the most stereotypically Soviet things I can think of. All of the Venera missions carried special medallions engraved with Soviet imagery and made out of titanium so as to withstand the Veniusian environment. On some other planet, possibly the only evidence of human existence is a bunch of melted metal and possibly a few representations of something that no longer exists, something that a lot of people at the time believed in, that held their hopes and dreams—that is haunting. To me the Venera program encapsulates a lot of the same elements of unexpected humanity as the saga of the Mars rovers, but is more tragic because it has a different level of temporality.
amandla
titsay
prguitarman
vaporwave
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
