The clearest photos taken of our sister-planet #Venus were taken on #ThisDayInHistory in 1982 when the #Soviet lander #Venera13 touched down on the brutally-hot world. Lacking a direct profit motive made the Soviet space-#science programme consistently pathbreaking and exciting.

We Landed On "Hell" (And Survived): The Soviet Mission To Venus We always pictured Venus as Earth’s "twin sister"—a lush, tropical jungle hiding under the clouds. But when the Soviet Union finally landed there, they didn't find paradise. They found Hell. 🌋💀 While the US was busy playing golf on the Moon, the Soviet Venera Program was attempting the impossible: landing a robot on a planet that wanted to kill it. In this episode, we uncover the wild, untold story of the Cold War space race to Venus. We are talking about a world where the atmospheric pressure will crush a submarine, it rains sulfuric acid, and the temperature is hot enough to melt lead. We breakdown the insane engineering of the Soviet "kamikaze robots"—probes that were built like tanks but only survived for minutes before being cooked alive. We discuss the runaway greenhouse effect that turned Venus into a scorched hellscape, and we react to the haunting, yellow-tinted first photos of the surface sent back by Venera 13. We dive deep into: - The Failures: Why early probes were crushed like soda cans before they even hit the ground. - The Triumph: How the Soviets finally stuck the landing (and the camera lens cap disaster). - The Warning: What Venus teaches us about climate change on Earth. - The End: Why did we stop going? Is the cost of surviving Hell just too high? This is a story of human stubbornness, titanium coffins, and the terrifying beauty of our solar system’s most dangerous planet. Hit play to step onto the surface of Venus. 🚀🔥 👇 Would you go? If we had the tech to survive, would you visit Venus, or is Mars the only option? Subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and let us know in the comments if you prefer the Red Planet or the Hell Planet!

📣 New Podcast! "We Landed On "Hell" (And Survived): The Soviet Mission To Venus" on @Spreaker #astronomy #coldwar #cosmos #engineering #greenhouseeffect #nasa #physics #planets #podcast #scaryspace #science #sovietunion #spaceexploration #spacehistory #spacerace #techhistory #venera13 #venus

Here the two Venera 13 panoramas have been reprojected to make the horizon straight. Each panorama is curved, running from the horizon at each end down to the foreground in the middle.

Once you have those panoramas you can do some other hings with them. Each one sees the horizon at each end and the foreground in the middle, so they can be projected into a sort of cylindrical projection which straightens the horizon. Here are the two Venera 13 panoramas.

#venus #venera13

#OTD the #SovietUnion (#USSR) was successful in landing #Venera13 on the surface of #Venus, sending back this first color #panorama of the #Venusian surface! #Venera 13 lander survived for 127 minutes, nearly 4X its planned design life of only 32 minutes.

📸 credit: @tsplanets