Launch of Venera 3

Venera 3 was a Soviet space probe sent to Venus, the third in the series of Venera missions, which carried a landing capsule. It reached the planet after a flight of several months, becoming the first human-made object to hit the surface of another planet. However, its communication system had failed before arrival, so it sent back no data about the atmosphere or surface. Its twin Venera 2 had failed in the same way. The loss of contact was a blow to the Soviet programme, but the lessons from these failures helped designers of later probes. Venera 4 successfully transmitted data from within the atmosphere in 1967, and in 1970 Venera 7 made the first soft landing on another planet.

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