On this day in space! July 22, 1972: Venera 8 spacecraft lands on Venus

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After traveling 117 days to get to Venus, the spacecraft only made it 50 minutes in the planet's harsh conditions

A metal space capsule sits next to a plaque in a museum
A replica of the Venera 8 sits in a museum (Image credit: Hall of Venus/NPO Lavochkin)

On July 22, 1972, a spacecraft landed on Venus! The Soviet space probe Venera 8 was the second spacecraft to successfully execute a soft landing on the planet's surface.

Venera 8 spent 117 days traveling to Venus and only survived for 50 minutes before the planet's harsh atmosphere got the best of its hardware. But it did manage to accomplish plenty of science before dying on Venus. During its descent, it collected and transmitted data about Venus's thick and toxic atmosphere.

Related stories

— Venera timeline: The Soviet Union's Venus missions in pictures

— Venus' atmosphere: Composition, climate and weather

— How was Venus formed?

This data helped scientists learn that Venus's clouds hover at a very high altitude, and that the atmosphere is actually a lot clearer close to the surface.

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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