Venera 2

Mission

Venera 2 was launched by a Molniya carrier rocket from Site 31/6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 05:02 UTC on 12 November 1965. The first three stages placed the spacecraft and Blok-L upper stage into a low Earth parking orbit, after which the Blok-L fired to propel Venera 2 into heliocentric orbit bound for Venus. Its orbit had a perihelion of 0.716 AU, aphelion of 1.197 AU, eccentricity of 0.252, inclination of 4.29 degrees, and an orbital period of 341 days.

The spacecraft carried eight scientific instruments: magnetometer ion traps, an imaging system, solar and cosmic x-ray detectors, cosmic-ray gas-discharge counters, piezoelectric detectors, ion traps, a photon Geiger counter, and cosmic radio emission receivers. It made its closest approach to Venus at 02:52 UTC on 27 February 1966 at a distance of 23810 km. During the flyby all instruments were activated, requiring radio contact to be suspended; the probe was to store data and transmit it afterward.

Following the flyby the spacecraft failed to reestablish communications and was declared lost on 4 March 1966. An investigation determined that a radiator malfunction caused increased gas temperatures that damaged receiving and encoding units and overheated the solar panels. Useful scientific data might have been collected but none was transmitted to Earth.