Venus Observed

I can tell from here...what the inhabitants of Venus are like; they resemble the Moors of Granada; a small, black people, burned by the sun, full of wit and fire, always in love, writing verse, fond of music, arranging festivals, dances and tournaments every day.

--Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686

After reconnoitering cloud-covered Venus with eight separate unmanned spacecraft--three American and five Russian, including two Soviet landing vehicles--scientists are now certain that De Fontenelle's Eden is, in fact, more like Dante's Inferno. Its surface temperature is a hellish 900DEG F. Its atmosphere, consisting largely of carbon dioxide, is at least 90 times as thick as the earth's, producing crushing surface pressures of 1,500 Ibs. per sq. in. Its clouds are laden with sulfuric acid. Yet a major mystery remains: Why has a planet so like the earth in size, mass and density evolved in such a dramatically different way?

Hoping to answer that planetary puzzle, the Soviets last June launched two more unmanned spacecraft, Venera (Venus) 9 and 10. Last week, after arcing across 186 million miles of space, the first of the probes approached its target and released a small lander, emblazoned with hammer and sickle. After deploying a balloon-like French-designed parachute system, the vehicle descended slowly through the atmosphere and made a soft landing. Prechilled in the coldness of space, the probe's instruments survived 53 minutes on the torrid surface--three minutes longer than the last Russian lander. They radioed a flood of data, including the first photographic image of the hidden Venusian landscape--a jumble of large jagged rocks rather than the sandy desert expected by some experts. Said Project Scientist Boris Nepoklonov: "We thought there couldn't be rocks on Venus [because] they would all be annihilated by constant wind and temperature erosion, but here they are, with edges absolutely not blunted. This picture makes us reconsider all our concepts of Venus."

While the lander transmitted its historic picture, the first from another planet's surface, the mother ship swung into orbit around Venus to become its first satellite (Venus has no known natural moons) and continued to transmit information on its environment. At week's end, Moscow announced that Venera 10 had repeated its twin's triumph.

The last U.S. craft to venture near Venus was Mariner 10; it took the first closeup pictures of the Venusian clouds in February 1974 en route to the sun's innermost planet, Mercury. In 1978 NASA hopes to launch an equally ambitious probe. A Pioneer spacecraft will drop five separate exploratory packages into Venus' atmosphere--provided, of course, that budget cutters do not kill the mission before it gets off the ground.

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