Probing Venus: Nine Spacecraft From the First Flyby to Today

Launched in February 1961, Venera 1 was the first spacecraft to perform an interplanetary flight and the first to fly past Venus. Radio contact was lost before its May 19, 1961 flyby, so it returned only limited data gathered in interplanetary space.

Mariner 2 launched from Cape Canaveral on August 27, 1962 and passed within about 34,773 kilometers of Venus on December 14, 1962. It was the first robotic space probe to report successfully from a planetary encounter, even though it carried far less instrumentation than the Soviet Venera probes and had no television camera.

Launched in 1967, Venera 4 combined a lander designed to enter the Venusian atmosphere and parachute toward the surface with a carrier and flyby spacecraft that relayed the lander communications. It was one of the earlier missions of a program that went on to several firsts at Venus.

Venera 7 landed on December 15, 1970. It became the first spacecraft to execute a successful soft landing on another planet and the first to transmit data from another planet surface back to Earth.

Launched on June 8, 1975, Venera 9 was an orbiter and a lander. The orbiter was the first spacecraft ever to orbit Venus, and the lander was the first to return images from the surface of another planet. At about 4,936 kilograms the pair was among the heaviest interplanetary probes flown up to that time.

Launched in June 1983, Venera 15 was an uncrewed orbiter meant to map the surface of Venus with high resolution imaging systems. It was identical to its sister craft Venera 16 and was based on modifications to the earlier Venera probes.

Vega 1 launched in December 1984 and was developed from the earlier Venera design. Its name, VeGa, joins the first letters of the Russian words for Venus and Halley, because the one spacecraft was meant to visit both the planet and the comet.

Venus Express was the first Venus exploration mission of the European Space Agency. Launched in November 2005, it arrived in April 2006 and returned science data from a polar orbit with seven instruments, aiming at long term observation of the atmosphere. ESA concluded the mission in December 2014.

Akatsuki, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency probe launched in 2010, lost its main engine during the first orbit attempt in December 2010. Engineers used its smaller attitude control thrusters to reach Venus orbit in December 2015, and it became the first spacecraft to study the super rotation of the Venus atmosphere.