Venera 1
First interplanetary spacecraft and first to fly past Venus.
Venera 1, also known as Venera-1VA No.2 and occasionally in the West as Sputnik 8, was the first spacecraft to perform an interplanetary flight and the first to fly past Venus. Launched in February 1961 as part of the Soviet Union's Venera programme, it was intended as an impactor but flew past Venus on 19 May of the same year. Radio contact was lost before the flyby, so only some data from interplanetary space were returned.
Quick Facts
- Operator
- OKB-1
- Harvard designation
- 1961 Gamma 1
- Satcat
- 80
- Mission duration
- 7 days
- Spacecraft
- 1VA No.2
- Launch mass
- 6,424.0 kg / 14,162 lb
- Dry mass
- 643.5 kg / 1,419 lb
- Launched
- 12 February 1961, 00:34:36
Facts from the source article.
Spacecraft
Venera 1 tipped the scales at 643.5 kilograms. Its body was a cylinder 1.05 meters across, capped with a dome, making the whole thing 2.035 meters tall. Inside, dry nitrogen kept the pressure at 1.2 atmospheres, and fans stirred the air to spread heat evenly. Two solar panels jutted out from the cylinder, feeding silver-zinc batteries. A 2-meter wire-mesh parabolic antenna, working at 922.8 MHz, was meant to beam data from Venus back to Earth. A 2.4-meter antenna boom handled short-wave signals while the probe was still near Earth. On the solar panels, semidirectional quadrupole antennas managed routine telemetry and commands on a circularly-polarized decimetre radio band. Science gear included a flux-gate magnetometer on the boom, two ion traps for solar wind, micrometeorite detectors, Geiger counter tubes, and a sodium iodide scintillator for cosmic rays. One solar panel carried an experiment to check temperatures of test coatings. Infrared or ultraviolet radiometers might have been aboard. The dome held a KDU-414 engine for mid-course tweaks. Motorized thermal shutters controlled temperature. For most of the trip, Venera 1 spun for stability. It was the first craft built to correct its path mid-flight, switching to 3-axis stabilization by locking onto the Sun and the star Canopus. If it had made it to Venus, it would have shifted to another 3-axis mode, fixing on the Sun and Earth, and using that parabolic antenna to send data for the first time.
Launch
In February 1961, the Soviet Union made two attempts to send a probe to Venus. The first, Venera-1VA No.1, never left Earth orbit because a power transformer failed. That transformer had been wrapped in foil and painted black and white to manage its temperature. The second attempt, Venera 1, launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Molniya rocket at 00:34:36 GMT on 12 February 1961. The vehicle, designated L1-6V, flew into a clear blue winter sky and reached orbit. Together with the Blok-L upper stage, the spacecraft first entered a 229 km low Earth orbit. Then the upper stage fired, sending Venera 1 onto a heliocentric path toward Venus. Its 11D33 engine was the first staged-combustion-cycle rocket engine ever built, and it also marked the first time an ullage engine was used to start a liquid-fuel rocket engine in space.
Failure
Venera 1's first telemetry session revealed it had not entered its constant solar orientation mode, causing a power shortage. This was an anticipated problem, so the craft performed a rough Sun alignment and shut down non-essential systems. However, the radio transmitters were poorly designed, and contact was quickly lost. The signal returned on 17 February, but the probe still could not properly lock onto the Sun, triggering another protective shutdown of the transmitter. Three successful telemetry sessions collected solar-wind and cosmic-ray data near Earth, at the magnetopause, and on 19 February from 1,900,000 km away. Following Luna 2's discovery of the solar wind, Venera 1 offered the first confirmation that this plasma existed uniformly in deep space. Seven days later, the next scheduled session never happened. On 19 May 1961, Venera 1 flew within 100,000 km of Venus. In June, the British radio telescope at Jodrell Bank may have picked up weak signals from the craft. Soviet engineers attributed the failure to an overheated solar-direction sensor.
More in Space Probes of ESA, Japan, China, India and the USSR
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