Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry
187 comments
·May 2, 2025porphyra
It's funny/sad how a bunch of Soviet Venera probes had malfunctioning camera lens caps and returned black photos. From Venera 9-12 all four probes had malfunctioning lens caps. And then
> The Venera 14 craft had the misfortune of ejecting the camera lens cap directly under the surface compressibility tester arm, and returned information for the compressibility of the lens cap rather than the surface.
FredPret
It's funny now - imagine being the Commissar for Lens Cap design in the old USSR and overseeing all that
dluan
It's not limited to Soviet missions. My high school physics teacher worked at JPL on the Mars Climate Orbiter in the 90s. His entire NASA career was in development of it, and after 10 months of travel following successful launch, the thing exploded in the atmosphere without ever reaching the surface because the team at JPL used metric while Lockheed Martin used imperial. He was so spiritually broken by the experience that he quit and became a high school physics teacher. Great teacher, but to have your life's work go up in smoke like that is brutal.
cbanek
And the classic accelerometer installed backward which doomed the Genesis mission sample return, although some bits were successfully recovered, the parachute never deployed.
wileydragonfly
Should have gone with the “martians shot it down” explanation which was far cooler and less embarrassing
VectorLock
The ultimate "fuck this shit- I'm out."
SoftTalker
Teaching high school physics will do more good for more people than landing a spacecraft on Mars.
staplung
Oh that Commissar was fine. It was the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Systems on Interplanetary Probes that got thrown under the avtobus.
roughly
I heard the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Planetary Environments caught the brunt of the blame, but the real fault was with the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Atmospheric Dynamics, who got off scott free. Turns out he was the general’s nephew.
drob518
Sergei is, sadly, ahem, no longer with us.
smallnix
Jest aside, do we know how such failure was handled in the USSR?
macbr
At least with the Venus probes they were only publicly announced when they were well on their way to Venus with failures either not getting published or getting assigned alibi mission goals (e.g. if they failed to leave earth's orbit) so failure modes were limited to the destination.
codedokode
Stalin died in 1953, and these probes were launched much later, so there were no chance to get into a Gulag. However for people who worked earlier the possibility to get there was always nearby.
Sergei Korolev, a famous Russian rocket designer (who was later responsible for launching a first satellite and first human space flight), had to go through the prison and labour camp. In 1938 he was head of a laboratory for jet propulsion (mainly for development of weapon), and as jet engines were not well studied, experimental models often failed with explosions. After another failed test, several laboratory employees were arrested, and after they testified, Korolev. They were charged with sabotage - creating a secret anti-Soviet organization with the purpose of weakening Soviet defence. After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken, he admitted the guilt and soon was sentenced to 10 years of work in labour camps [1]. The sentence was later reviewed and he was transferred to a prison where he was allowed to continue working on jet propulsion.
Another example is Andrey Tupolev - Soviet aircraft designer ("Tu" series of planes is named after him). He was also charged with sabotage (conspiracy to slow down aircraft development in USSR) and espionage during Stalin times and had to design his planes in a prison [2].
After Stalin death, both Korolev and Tupolev cases were reviewed and they were admitted not guilty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment
kerkeslager
This is a question I've tried to answer to myself, and I think it's actually pretty hard to tell, if all your sources are Western media. I'll give you my impressions but I'm by no means an expert.
I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals.
There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm.
None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
eh_why_not
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_482
> Its landing module, which weighs 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), is highly likely to reach the surface of Earth in one piece as it was designed to withstand 300 G's of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure.
Awesome! I don't know how you can design for 300 G's of acceleration!
WJW
Overbuild everything. For things that might be fragile-ish like surface mounted electronics, cast the whole thing in resin. As a sibling poster has mentioned, we shoot things out of artillery tubes these days that have way harsher accelerations than 300g.
MarkMarine
300g is nuts. Electronics in a shell is one thing, this is a landing craft. In a prior life my designs had to survive 12g aerial drop loads and we had to make things pretty robust.
null
numpad0
Gun scopes are minimum 500G rated. Apparently that's the ballpark for recoils(the reaction force from the barrel becoming a rocket engine, and/or the bolt/carrier bottoming out)
os2warpman
There are electronics and gyroscopes designed for >9,000 G loads, in guided artillery shells.
Aerospace is awesome.
nandomrumber
88.2 m/s^2
For well under a second though, typically artillery muzzle velocity is, what, two to three thousand feet a second?
Still, it’s wild that guidance electronics and control mechanisms can survive that sort of acceleration.
af78
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M777_howitzer (typical howitzer):
- barrel length (x): 5.08 meters
- muzzle velocity (v): 827 m/s
Assuming a constant acceleration γ, x = γ * t² / 2 and v = γ * t
Hence:
- t = 2 * x / v = 12.29 ms
- γ = v / t = 67316 m / s² = 7000 G
A bit lower than 9000 G, but in the same ballpark.
Certain rounds, like Excalibur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur) or BONUS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors/Nexter_Bonus), are sophisticated and are able to cope with such accelerations.
MathMonkeyMan
> 88.2 m/s^2
Isn't that more like 9g?
Baeocystin
That vacuum tubes(!) were part of that package, and were able to be that robust, still floors me every time I think about it.
casylum
If anyone wants to try and see it the orbit is listed.
aaron695
[dead]
dgrin91
Nitpicking, but wouldn't it be 300 Gs of deceleration? I know the math is basically the same, but technically the words a mean different things
amoshebb
I think this is a case where “technically” the words mean the same thing but “generally” they mean different things.
Rover222
This is wrong when talking about the physics of something. Deceleration is acceleration. Acceleration is just a change in velocity.
anyfoo
Acceleration, deceleration, point is: Something is going to apply 300 gs in a certain direction to design for.
It's not like you can tell whether you're going slow or fast, in one direction, the other direction, or even just standing still, if you close your eyes.
stickfigure
Sure you can. You just need a luminiferous aether detector.
crazydoggers
Acceleration is a vector. So if you apply the “deceleration” long enough you’ll eventually be accelerating in the opposite direction. Without a frame of reference it’s all the same. Even with a frame of reference you’re still accelerating just that it’s in he opposite direction of the current velocity.
Eduard
I fly through trams in completely different directions depending on whether it accelerates or decelerates. So for sure a system's design must consider more than just the magnitude of acceleration.
drob518
It’s just a minus sign.
jbnorth
What is deceleration but acceleration in the opposite direction? /s
JohnKemeny
There's no need for the "/s" on the end, there. Deceleration, and especially in this case with a natural frame of reference, deceleration is negative acceleration.
esotericimpl
[dead]
exabrial
Flip your phone upside brah
jasonkester
Childhood me hopes this will play out exactly like the Six Million Dollar Man episode. That it will roam around terrorizing rural California, and we’ll have to team up with a pretty young Russian scientist and Bigfoot to stop it.
I wonder if the producers of that show knew about that failed mission, and that this was actually really in earth orbit, when they wrote that episode.
rbanffy
Would be awesome if it soft-landed on a field and started taking and transmitting pictures of sheep.
LordGrignard
or even better yet, landed on a desert and taking pictures of cactii and camels
em-bee
when i first heard about this probe last week i was wondering, isn't this thing old and unique enough to warrant a mission to rescue and preserve it? combined with todays lower prices for a space flight, it might just be worth it.
and now it looks like it might just survive anyways. but then according to the article there also seems to be a second (identical?) model. so maybe it's not that important, except for maybe material analysis what does 50 years of exposure to space do to the material.
bunderbunder
I would guess that the most expensive part of such an endeavor wouldn't be the launch; it would be developing and building a spacecraft capable of capturing it and bringing it back.
Even the Space Shuttle wasn't necessarily a perfect fit for the job as-is. Hubble was serviced many times, but it was specifically designed for on-orbit capture and servicing by the Shuttle. Before they decommissioned the shuttle they actually had to install an extra piece of hardware to make it feasible to capture and de-orbit using future non-crewed spacecraft. And even then that's just to make sure it crashes in a safe place, not to bring it home intact.
There was also a mission to service a satellite that wasn't designed for the purpose, and they had a really hard time capturing it and very nearly had to give up after days' worth of failed attempts. It finally took simultaneous EVA by three astronauts to coordinate a successful capture (one to grab it by hand, two to get it onto a specialized adapter rig built just for that satellite so that the Canadarm could hold it), which is quite a thing considering that the Shuttle's only designed to allow two people on EVA at a time.
This craft is likely tumbling, which I presume would make it unacceptably dangerous for a crewed mission (and certainly rules out anyone just going out there and grabbing it with their hands), in addition to making successful capture that much more difficult.
chiffre01
Is this one of the missions where the shuttle returned a satellite from orbit? There were a few:
https://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/dev/hillger/Shuttle-related...
RobotToaster
Wouldn't it be possible to "simply" match it's tumble?
paul80808
Only if it is only spinning along one axis. Very likely to be spinning on multiple axis. That said, with enough money and effort I'm sure we could figure something out, like shooting it strategically with small projectiles to slow the spin, etc.
stevage
That sounds absolutely terrifying for the astronaut. Imagine the whole universe spinning past you every second. Not to mention the forces.
throw_a_grenade
No, when it tumbles, it does it around its centre of mass. You'd have to get a craft that has empty area inside.
If you know Elite, it has space stations where you dock by going inside, while matching station's rotation. That's only in one axis (and note the hangar goes through the axis of rotation, i.e. centre of mass). To add rotation around another axis would make the task impossible.
MetallicDragon
I don't think we have any active craft capable of recovering it. The space shuttle probably could have done it, but with a cost of about $1.5b per launch, there is no way that would be worth it.
SpaceX's Dragon 2 easily has enough cargo capacity to bring it down (~3 tons vs 0.5 ton), but there's still the question of intercepting, capturing, and securing it in Dragon's cargo bay. That would still cost something north of $100m to recover the lander.
olex
Dragon likely wouldn't be able to get it, unfortunately.
The lander would easily fit into the unpressurized cargo bay (the "trunk"), that is typically used to launch various vacuum-bound payloads alongside pressurized cargo inside the capsule. However, for a return from orbit, the trunk cannot be used - it is not protected by a heat shield, and is ejected before re-entry.
You are correct that the return payload mass of a Dragon would technically allow it. But you'd need to somehow get the captured object _inside_ the capsule, which may be possible via the EVA front hatch for something smaller, but not 1m in diameter like the Venera lander.
Starship should be able to do it, since it is fully protected by heat shielding and returns in one piece, not ejecting any modules in orbit. But that's quite a while from being operational yet.
nradov
No, the Space Shuttle could not have done it. It had nowhere near the ΔV that would have been necessary for an intercept and capture. The OMS had only a tiny fuel supply. We're talking about orders of magnitude difference here.
dmurray
Most of the benefit of the Shuttle program, and manned spaceflight in general, has come from R and D on the launch process, or from the prestige and bragging rights of being able to launch humans into space. So once they're up there, you're getting your money's worth (or not) no matter what they do, you may as well do something cool like recover a historic satellite.
pirate787
The Shuttle program was a disaster that consumed NASA's budget and set back manned space flight by a generation.
Sharlin
You're quite overestimating our capabilities as a species if you think that planning, developing, and launching a recovery mission in a few weeks would be even remotely feasible. Sure, we've known that the thing's up there all this time, so in the very counterfactual scenario where we had started thinking about a retrieval mission a few of years ago, and the Space Shuttle was still a thing, and someone was willing to foot the n-hundred-million-dollar bill, I guess? I don't think any nation on Earth currently has the hardware required to rendezvous with a random spacecraft in orbit and bring it down in one piece. The Shuttle was unique in that respect.
potato3732842
Feasible for a 50yo project motivated by nostalgia? No
National existential crisis? They'd probably take Dragon and figure out how to make it work.
rdtsc
In principle this is not science fiction, Space Shuttle captured a satellite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49, they just didn't return it back. It was a catch, fix, and release.
mk_stjames
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A brought two satellites back in the cargo bay that had not reached their proper orbit on a prior launch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32 brought back the Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment, a bigass science probe the size of a small school bus.
There are still missions that are classified that could have done so as well.
It was something the shuttle was designed to do, with the 60-foot cargo bay requirement and the ability to bring back the mass it flew with coming specifically from the military.
alnwlsn
I've heard that one of the things they wanted the shuttle to do was launch, capture a spacecraft in polar orbit, and land at the launch site within a single orbit. Some say it was so they could secretly grab a Soviet satellite right out of the sky when it was out of range of Russia, but I'm not sure how you would secure something like that in the payload bay.
rdtsc
> STS-51-A marked the first time a shuttle deployed two communications satellites, and retrieved from orbit two other communications satellites
That's very interesting. First time I heard about it. Thanks for the reference!
dreamcompiler
They did that when they fixed the Hubble telescope too. Five times.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servi...
euroderf
How many satellites have the USAF and US Space Command captured ? Inquring minds want to know.
kjkjadksj
They do run their own unmanned shuttle based platform spacecraft but full capabilities aren’t public.
DonHopkins
Is Catch Fix Release like Trap Neuter Return? Did they snip its ear tip for identification?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93neuter%E2%80%93re...
rdtsc
> Is Catch Fix Release like Trap Neuter Return?
And Soviets were wondering why their satellite numbers were not growing...
walrus01
The space shuttle also captured and returned the long duration exposure facility satellite, a materials test bus for future missions. Extremely uneconomical, however.
Rover222
This thing would be going at higher than earth orbital velocity, making an in-space capture of it more or less impossible.
AStonesThrow
Perhaps scientists would have some particular interest in that particular hardware as it had been launched and flown in Earth orbit, but I'll tell ya: it's way easier to get your hands on flight spare equipment; while this stuff hasn't flown, it's probably a really good copy of whatever they did launch into space, and way better condition.
When I worked "on Mars" there was a "flight spare" copy of a Viking instrument which was the predecessor to the one we were working on, and of course it was encased in Plexiglas as a museum piece, but it was truly a redundant copy, as NASA was into copying everything they sent into space, (what was the saying in Contact? "Why have only one, when you can buy two at twice the price?") so that if anything needed to be tweaked, or went wrong, they would have this copy on the ground that they could experiment with to their hearts' content.
klysm
Who’s gonna pay for that?
erulabs
Any projected intercept for earth yet? Feels like it might be quite beautiful on reentry assuming you’re in the right (but not TOO right) spot.
ahmedfromtunis
Man, I wish we had the technology to just concoct a spacecraft that can intercept the lander in its shallow reentry and bring it back in as few pieces as possible.
I don't know what value can it have to be studied since it never left low earth orbit (albeit it was there since 1972), but I know it would be a cool addition to any museum that may host it.
fsckboy
space shuttle, the air force still has one, doesn't it? also, elon could whip something up.
pacificmint
The Air Force never had a space shuttle, though NASA flew missions for the Air Force and the NRO.
But at this point none of the remaining shuttles are in an operational state.
Maybe you are thinking of the X-37 which is operated by the space force?
potato3732842
It would be pretty stereotypically Soviet to create a parachute system that only mostly (some of the Venera probes kinda crashed) works in the intended use case (short 1-way trip to Venus) but also somehow manages to work once way, way, way outside of its intended operating environment (50yr orbiting earth).
varjag
Parachute deployment was possibly gasodynamic rather than electronically controlled. In which case there's a broad similarity on reentry in Earth atmosphere which could trigger the release.
orbital-decay
Sounds unlikely, but it could have malfunctioned. I believe the deceleration chute was designed to deploy after the hot entry phase and be triggered mechanically once crossing the certain deceleration threshold of about 2g (I could be wrong though, take it with a huge grain of salt). It also worked as a pilot chute for the cap protecting the main one.
mrtksn
In my experience, in soviet engineering they don't augment stuff unless absolutely necessary. As a result, stuff tend to work as long as the physics work. It results in relatively crude but simple and reliable machines. The elegance comes from simplicity, in western tech the elegance comes from being well thought and designed for specific use cases. I.e. a Lada will be uncomfortable, loud, uneconomical car but at the same time it will withstand abuse and be easy to repair enough to get it going.
Thinking about the elevator in our commie block, it would have given a heart attack to a western European. Instead of having double doors to keep us safe from the moving wall, it had pads on the bottom and top edge so if your hand or leg is stuck, the pad will be pushed and the elevator will stop immediately. Also there was a tiny cabinet door on the right side so you can access the mechanism to force open the door or force move/halt the elevator. As kids, we would be experimenting with those mechanisms. They worked every single time, no legs or arms were lost.
JohnMakin
I had the pleasure of working closely with a Russian engineer on a team once and had to “massage” his stuff quite often into a state that would be deemed acceptable to leadership. It looked terrible, hacked together, haphazard - but it literally never broke. It’s been the better part of a decade now but I wouldnt be surprised if his stuff outlived mine.
throwewey
A Lada is actually an Italian car built under license.
Neah, paternoster is quite a common elevator design in the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift
725686
"The name paternoster ("Our Father", the first two words of the Lord's Prayer in Latin) was originally applied to the device because the elevator is in the form of a loop and is thus similar to rosary beads used as an aid in reciting prayers."
I would have thought the name was related to the users praying before entering to increase their chances of surviving the ordeal.
mrtksn
Depends on the model. It's Lada Niva that is legendary.
necovek
Does not sound like they talked about the paternoster lift though: they did bring up doors and implied lift stopping in stations.
idiotsecant
Calling paternosters 'common' in the West is quite a stretch. They are a curiosity where they are found precisely because there are so few.
banku_brougham
Have a look up on the Russian town called Togliati
wileydragonfly
My elevator has double doors, but some of them were installed with too large of a gap between doors that a child can get trapped. The solution is to bolt plastic bumpers to the back of the outer door. Which, hey. Works.
0x000xca0xfe
To be fair Venus' atmosphere is pretty much hell.
BitwiseFool
Higher up the Venusian atmosphere is surprisingly earth-like. Interestingly though, once a probe gets deep enough into the atmosphere a parachute becomes unnecessary because the atmosphere has gotten so thick that a probe can simply soft-land.
drob518
Lander reports that Venus is very… earth-like.
marcodiego
If it falls in my backyard. Can I keep it to myself?
IncreasePosts
From a previous probe:
> Space law required that the space junk be returned to its national owner, but the Soviets denied knowledge or ownership of the satellite.[8] Ownership therefore fell to the farmer upon whose property the satellite fell. The pieces were thoroughly analyzed by New Zealand scientists which determined that they were Soviet in origin because of manufacturing marks and the high-tech welding of the titanium. The scientists concluded that they were probably gas pressure vessels of a kind used in the launching rocket for a satellite or space vehicle and had decayed in the atmosphere.[9]
I wonder how space law works when the national owner (CCCP) no longer exists? Does it go to Russia? Kazakhstan?
treyd
Usually international law regarding successor states applies, so it would almost certainly be Russia that would have a claim to it.
null
Article says ±3.1 days, but the author wrote a newer entry (go to homepage, click on latest article, click through to space.com link¹) that says May 10, ±2.2 days.
Starting to get to the range where a timezone would be helpful!
Via Wikipedia², which will probably also get updated fast, this page says they'll stay updated with the latest estimate: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-...
¹ https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
² https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_482