
Tape-Noise Triumph: Venera 7’s First Telemetry from Venus
In December 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 survived a hard landing on Venus after a parachute failure, delivering 35 minutes of descent data and, only after revisiting the tapes, 23 minutes of faint surface telemetry showing a ground temperature around 475 C and about 90 bars of pressure—the first data ever transmitted from the surface of another planet.
