The astronauts began their conference just after a critical review
that determines whether the mission will go forward concluded
successfully.
“We are go for launch! The Flight Readiness Review has concluded and @NASA’s SpaceX Crew Dragon mission is cleared to proceed toward liftoff,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on Twitter.
“Just
heard that everything went well with the FRR, we’re excited to be still
on the countdown,” Hurley said. “Hopefully, we’ll see the static fire
here in a couple hours.”
Veteran NASA astronauts preparing to blast off in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule shared their expectations for the approaching historic launch.
On Friday, (May 22), less than a week before their scheduled May 27 launch, veteran NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley addressed the public in a virtual conference from crew quarters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts offered their final thoughts before heading to the International Space Station.
Their mission, known as Demo-2, will see the astronauts launch from Kennedy aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which will make them the first astronauts to ride an American rocket in nearly a decade. Once they arrive at the International Space Station, Behnken and Hurley will spend anywhere from one to four months in orbit.
Astronaut family life
Leading up
to launch, all astronauts undergo a standard preflight quarantine to
prevent bringing any viruses or unwanted bacteria up to space.
Unusually, both Behnken’s and Hurley’s families have been living in
quarantine conditions ahead of the launch anyway because of the COVID-19
pandemic. So, up until the astronauts arrived at Kennedy on May 20,
they could quarantine with their families.
Behnken noted that
it’s been a “silver lining” that he and Hurley have had “the time with
our sons leading up to this launch,” he said during today’s remarks.
“They would have not normally been inside of our quarantine.”
In
addition to standard quarantine conditions, both SpaceX and NASA have
taken extra precautions to limit any possible exposure to the novel
coronavirus. The astronauts have been tested multiple times for the
virus and might be tested again leading up to the launch, they said.
“We’ve been tested at least twice so far, and rumor has it we might be
tested again before we go,” Hurley said.
In less than a week, the pair will say goodbye to their families as they leave astronaut crew quarters and walk out to a modified Tesla Model X car bearing NASA’s iconic Worm logo, which will take them to the launch pad. Before they get in the Tesla “will be the point where we get a chance to really see our families for the final time prior to launch,” Behnken said.
During their remarks, Behnken and Hurley each offered some kind words
for his crewmate. The two have been training together through NASA’s
commercial crew program since 2015.
“Doug
is ready for anything all the time,” Behnken said about Hurley. “He’s
always prepared and when you’re going to fly into space on a test
mission, you couldn’t ask for a better person or a better type of
individual to be there with you.”
Hurley had a few equally positive remarks about Behnken’s thorough nature. “There’s no stone unturned, there’s no way that he doesn’t have every potential eventuality already thought about,” Hurley said. “There’s no question I can ask him that he doesn’t already have probably the best answer for.”
The astronauts began their conference just after a critical review
that determines whether the mission will go forward concluded
successfully.
“We are go for launch! The Flight Readiness Review has concluded and @NASA’s SpaceX Crew Dragon mission is cleared to proceed toward liftoff,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on Twitter.
“Just heard that everything went well with the FRR, we’re excited to be still on the countdown,” Hurley said. “Hopefully, we’ll see the static fire here in a couple hours.”
On May 17, 1974, NASA launched the first Synchronous Meteorological Satellite, SMS-1. This was the first satellite designed to monitor meteorological conditions from a geostationary orbit. This kind of orbit allowed it to stay above a fixed location as Earth rotates.
One
of the instruments on this spacecraft was a visible infrared spin-scan
radiometer (VISSR), which provided high-quality cloud cover data 24
hours a day. It also carried a data collection and transmission system
that allowed it to relay data from central weather facilities to smaller
regional stations.
Another device known as a space environmental monitor measured the charged particles in Earth’s radiation belts and the solar wind.
The satellite was shaped like a cylinder and measured about 7.5 feet long, not including a 33-inch magnetometer that stuck out of one end. It launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta rocket and remained operational for about 7 years. It was replaced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new GOES satellite, which was almost identical.
From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA was established in 1958 to keep U.S. space efforts abreast of recent Soviet achievements, such as the launching of the world’s first artificial satellite–Sputnik 1–in 1957. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers raced to become the first country to put a man in space and return him to Earth. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely returned to Earth. One month later, Shepard’s suborbital flight restored faith in the U.S. space program.
NASA continued to trail the Soviets closely until the late 1960s and the successes of the Apollo lunar program. In July 1969, the Americans took a giant leap forward with Apollo 11, a three-stage spacecraft that took U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon and returned them to Earth. On February 5, 1971, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, became the fifth astronaut to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission.
Astronomers have detected two stellar corpses whirling around each other, and they might be producing gravitational waves.
White dwarf stars are what become of stars like our sun after they run out of fuel and turn into leftover hot cores. For many years, researchers have predicted that there should be binary, or two-object, systems made up of white dwarf stars. According to general relativity, two such masses orbiting each other should emit energy in the form of gravitational waves, which are ripples or disturbances in the fabric of spacetime.
Now,
this is not the discovery of gravitational waves, rather it is the
discovery of this binary which may be a source for gravitational waves.
But, not only will this study advance our understanding of these systems
and gravitational wave sources, it will also be important in validating
the efficiency of an instrument that will launch in 2034.
The
instrument, LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) gravitational
wave observatory, will use the J2322+0509 system to essentially train
with. Because they already know they exist, it’s a good test to make
sure the instrument can correctly spot it.
“Verification binaries
are important because we know that LISA will see them within a few weeks
of turning on the telescopes,” Mukuemin Kilic, a co-author on this
study from the University of Oklahoma, said in the statement. “There’s
only a handful of LISA sources that we know of today. The discovery of
the first prototype of a new class of verification binary puts us well
ahead of where anyone could have anticipated.”
In a new study identifying and exploring this binary, researchers at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Harvard have detected, for the first time, a binary white dwarf system made up of two white dwarf stars (with helium cores) that are clearly separate stars. This system, known as J2322+0509, has a short orbital period of 1,201 seconds (just over 20 minutes) and is the first gravitational wave source of its kind ever identified.
“Theories predict that there are many double helium-core white dwarf binaries out there,” Warren Brown, CfA astronomer and lead author on the study, said in a statement. “This detection provides an anchor for those models, and for doing future experiments so that we can find more of these stars and determine their true numbers.”
This
system, whose orbital period is the third shortest period of all
detached binaries ever found, was fairly tough to spot. “This binary had
no light curve,” Brown said in the statement. “We couldn’t detect a
photometric signal because there isn’t one.” So instead of using a
photometric study, which looks at light itself, the team used
spectroscopic studies, which observe how matter interacts with
electromagnetic radiation like visible light, to identify the star’s
orbital motion.
But,
while the system was tricky to spot, it turns out that this type of
binary is an extremely strong source of gravitational waves, the team
found using theoretical calculations, according to the statement and the
study. The researchers determined that because of the system’s
alignment with respect to Earth, instruments should pick up a signal 2.5
times stronger than from the same system twisted a different
direction.
This binary won’t be a binary forever, though, as a consequence of the very gravitational waves the scientists hope to someday detect. “The orbit of this pair of objects is decaying,” Brown said. “The gravitational waves that are being emitted are causing the pair to lose energy; in six or seven million years they will merge into a single, more massive white dwarf.”
On March 29, 1807, the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers discovered the asteroid Vesta. Vesta is the second-largest body in the asteroid belt and is surpassed in size only by the dwarf planet Ceres.
To look for asteroids, astronomers would draw sky charts every night and look for spots that moved. Sunlight reflecting off the asteroids can make them look like faint stars, but unlike stars, the asteroids didn’t have a fixed location in the sky.
Vesta was the fourth object to be discovered in the region between Mars and Jupiter, which we now know as the asteroid belt. Olbers and other astronomers thought the asteroid belt might be the remains of a hypothetical planet that was either smashed to pieces by a collision or ripped apart by Jupiter’s gravity.
As the U.S. scrambles to respond to the spreading COVID-19 pandemic, NASA supercomputers are joining the effort to look for potential treatment and vaccine candidates.
A new initiative brings together NASA and the National Science Foundation as well as a host of Department of Energy laboratories, companies and academic institutions. The White House announced the effort, meant to divert spare computing resources to research aimed at slowing the pandemic, today (March 23).
“I’m proud that @NASA is lending our supercomputing expertise to assist in the global fight against COVID-19,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement on Twitter. “For more than six decades the agency has used its expertise to take on challenges that have benefited people worldwide in unexpected ways.”
One of the areas of NASA redirecting its supercomputer time is the Earth science division, according to Science Mission Directorate head Thomas Zurbuchen. “Researchers input satellite data to run climate models to predict Earth’s future climate,” Zurbuchen said in a statement on Twitter. “NASA is pleased to lend our supercomputing expertise to assist in the global fight against #COVID19.”
Researchers working on projects related to COVID-19 will be able to apply for time on the supercomputers, according to a White House statement, which should speed up calculations necessary for slowing the pandemic.
“America is coming together to fight COVID-19, and that means unleashing the full capacity of our world-class supercomputers to rapidly advance scientific research for treatments and a vaccine,” Michael Kratsios, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, said in the statement.
There’s a new contender for the “most exotic exoplanet” title.
The crown may have rested for a while now on the head of HD 189733 b, a cobalt-blue alien world where molten-glass rain whips sideways through the air at up to 5,400 mph (8,790 km/h). But a new study reports that iron rain likely falls through the thick, turbulent air of WASP-76 b, a bizarre “ultrahot Jupiter” that lies about 640 light-years from the sun, in the constellation Pisces.
WASP-76 b zips around its host star once every 1.8 Earth days, an orbit so tight that the gaseous planet is “tidally locked,” always showing the star the same face. Temperatures on this dayside climb above 4,350 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius) — hot enough to vaporize metals — whereas the nightside is a much cooler (but still ridiculous) 2,730 F (1,500 C), researchers said.
“These
are likely the most extreme climates we could ever find on a planet,”
said study lead author David Ehrenreich, an associate professor of
astronomy at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
“We have to
stretch our understanding of what is a climate, what is a planetary
atmosphere, to understand this object,” Ehrenreich told Space.com.
WASP-76 b was discovered in 2013. The alien planet is about as massive as Jupiter but nearly twice as wide, likely because the massive radiation loads the exoplanet receives from its host star puff up its atmosphere considerably. (And one quick note about the object’s distance: Some sources say that WASP-76 b is about 390 light-years away, but that number is inaccurate, Ehrenreich said. He and his colleagues calculated WASP-76 b’s distance using data from Europe’s ultraprecise star-mapping spacecraft Gaia.)
For the new study, the researchers studied WASP-76 b using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO), an instrument installed on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
ESPRESSO
detected a strong signature of iron vapor at the “evening” border that
separates WASP-76 b’s dayside from its nightside. But no such signature
was spotted at the “morning” border on the other side of the planet,
where the nightside melds into day.
“Something must be happening on the nightside that makes iron disappear,” Ehrenreich said.
The
best explanation, he added, is that winds and WASP-76 b’s rotation
carry vaporized iron from the dayside to the nightside. The nightside is
cool enough for the iron vapor to condense into clouds, which then dump
rain into the air over there. That rain could consist of compounds such
as iron sulfide or iron hydride.
But, “given the conditions, the
most likely [scenario] is that iron condenses into liquid droplets of
pure iron,” Ehrenreich said. (This iron rain probably eventually makes
its way back to the dayside again via atmospheric circulation,
perpetuating the cycle, he added.)
And that rain probably isn’t
sprinkling down in a gentle mist, because the big temperature disparity
between WASP-76 b’s two halves generates winds of startling ferocity.
The iron in the planet’s dayside air, for example, is hurtling toward
the nightside at about 11,000 mph (18,000 km/h), Ehrenreich said.
WASP-76
b’s exoticism doesn’t end there. The dayside atmosphere may be much
more puffed up than that of the nightside because of the higher heat
loads, the researchers said. So the “evening” and “morning” borders
between the two hemispheres might be marked by towering clouds that fall
from the light toward darkness.
“And the drizzle of this fall would not be water droplets but iron droplets,” Ehrenreich said.
The craziness of WASP-76 b has more than just gee-whiz appeal. The new information about this odd exoplanet should help scientists refine and test climate and global circulation models, leading to a better understanding of exoplanetary atmospheres in general, Ehrenreich said. And WASP-76 b also serves as a compelling reminder for researchers to keep an open mind, because nature churns out a dizzying diversity of worlds.
“Exoplanets are a real treasure trove full of surprises,” Ehrenreich said. “The more you look, the more you find.”
He and his colleagues aim to dig up more such surprises. The new results, which were published online today (March 11) in the journal Nature, come from the very first science observations ever made with ESPRESSO, back in September 2018. The researchers are now conducting a broad survey of exoplanet atmospheres using ESPRESSO, which could reveal if WASP-76 b is an outlier or a member of a very weird class of worlds.
“What we have now is a whole new way to trace the climate of the most extreme exoplanets,” Ehrenreich said in a statement.
Pioneer 5 (also known as Pioneer P-2, and Able 4, and nicknamed the “Paddle-Wheel Satellite”) was a spin-stabilized space probe in the NASA Pioneer program used to investigate interplanetary space between the orbits of Earth and Venus. It was launched on 11 March 1960 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 17A at 13:00:00 UTC with an on-orbit dry mass of 43 kg. It was a 0.66 m diameter sphere with 1.4 m span across its four solar panels and achieved a solar orbit of 0.806 × 0.995 AU (121,000,000 by 149,000,000 km).
Data was received until 30 April 1960. Among other accomplishments, the probe confirmed the existence of interplanetary magnetic fields. Pioneer 5 was the most successful probe in the Pioneer/Able series.
The original mission plan was for a launch in November 1959 where Pioneer 5 would conduct a flyby of Venus, but technical issues prevented the launch from occurring until early 1960 by which time the Venus window for the year had closed. Since it was not possible to send the probe to Venus, it would instead merely investigate interplanetary space and an actual mission to the planet would have to wait another three years.
Not
just one, but seven Earth-size planets that could potentially harbor
life have been identified orbiting a tiny star not too far away,
offering the first realistic opportunity to search for signs of alien
life outside the solar system.
The
planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1, about 40 light-years, or
235 trillion miles, from Earth. That is quite close in cosmic terms, and
by happy accident, the orientation of the orbits of the seven planets
allows them to be studied in great detail.
One
or more of the exoplanets in this new system could be at the right
temperature to be awash in oceans of water, astronomers said, based on
the distance of the planets from the dwarf star.
“This is the first time so many planets of this kind are found around the same star,” Michael Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium and the leader of an international team that has been observing Trappist-1, said during a telephone news conference organized by the journal Nature, which published the findings on Wednesday.
Scientists could even discover compelling evidence of aliens.
“I
think that we have made a crucial step toward finding if there is life
out there,” said Amaury H. M. J. Triaud, an astronomer at the University
of Cambridge in England and another member of the research team. “Here,
if life managed to thrive and releases gases similar to that we have on
Earth, then we will know.”
Cool red
dwarfs are the most common type of star, so astronomers are likely to
find more planetary systems like that around Trappist-1 in the coming
years.
“You
can just imagine how many worlds are out there that have a shot to
becoming a habitable ecosystem,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate
administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a NASA
news conference on Wednesday. “Are we alone out there? We’re making a
step forward with this — a leap forward, in fact — towards answering
that question.”
Telescopes on the ground now and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit will be able to discern some of the molecules in the planetary atmospheres. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch next year, will peer at the infrared wavelengths of light, ideal for studying Trappist-1.
Comparisons among the different conditions of the seven will also be revealing.
“The Trappist-1 planets make the search for life in the galaxy imminent,” said Sara Seager, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not a member of the research team. “For the first time ever, we don’t have to speculate. We just have to wait and then make very careful observations and see what is in the atmospheres of the Trappist planets.”
Even if the planets all turn out to be lifeless, scientists will have learned more about what keeps life from flourishing.
Astronomers always knew other stars must have planets, but until a couple of decades ago, they had not been able to spot them. Now they have confirmed more than 3,400, according to the Open Exoplanet Catalog. (An exoplanet is a planet around a star other than the sun.)
The
authors of the Nature paper include Didier Queloz, one of the
astronomers who discovered in 1995 the first known exoplanet around a
sunlike star.
While the Trappist
planets are about the size of Earth — give or take 25 percent in
diameter — the star is very different from our sun.
Trappist-1,
named after a robotic telescope in the Atacama Desert of Chile that the
astronomers initially used to study the star, is what astronomers call
an “ultracool dwarf,” with only one-twelfth the mass of the sun and a
surface temperature of 4,150 degrees Fahrenheit, much cooler than the
10,000 degrees radiating from the sun. Trappist is a shortening of
Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope.
During
the NASA news conference, Dr. Gillon gave a simple analogy: If our sun
were the size of a basketball, Trappist-1 would be a golf ball.
Until
the last few years, scientists looking for life elsewhere in the galaxy
have focused on finding Earth-size planets around sun-like stars. But
it is hard to pick out the light of a planet from the glare of a bright
star. Small dim dwarfs are much easier to study.
Last year, astronomers announced the discovery of an Earth-size planet around Proxima Centauri, the closest star at 4.24 light-years away. That discovery was made using a different technique that does not allow for study of the atmosphere.
Trappist-1 is about 8 percent the size of the sun.Credit…ESO
Trappist-1
periodically dimmed noticeably, indicating that a planet might be
passing in front of the star, blocking part of the light. From the shape
of the dips, the astronomers calculate the size of the planet.
Trappist-1’s light dipped so many times that the astronomers concluded, in research reported last year, that there were at least three planets around the star. Telescopes from around the world then also observed Trappist-1, as did the Spitzer Space Telescope of NASA.
Spitzer
observed Trappist-1 nearly around the clock for 20 days, capturing 34
transits. Together with the ground observations, it let the scientists
calculate not three planets, but seven. The planets are too small and
too close to the star to be photographed directly.
All
seven are very close to the dwarf star, circling more quickly than the
planets in our solar system. The innermost completes an orbit in just
1.5 days. The farthest one completes an orbit in about 20 days. That
makes the planetary system more like the moons of Jupiter than a larger
planetary system like our solar system.
“They form a very compact system,” Dr. Gillon said, “the planets being pulled close to each other and very close to the star.”
In
addition, the orbital periods of the inner six suggest that the planets
formed farther away from the star and then were all gradually pulled
inward, Dr. Gillon said.
Because the
planets are so close to a cool star, their surfaces could be at the
right temperatures to have water flow, considered one of the essential
ingredients for life.
The fourth,
fifth and sixth planets orbit in the star’s “habitable zone,” where the
planets could sport oceans. So far that is just speculation, but by
measuring which wavelengths of light are blocked by the planet,
scientists will be able to figure out what gases float in the
atmospheres of the seven planets.
So
far, they have confirmed for the two innermost planets that they are not
enveloped in hydrogen. That means they are rocky like Earth, ruling out
the possibility that they were mini-Neptune gas planets that are
prevalent around many other stars.
Because
the planets are so close to Trappist-1, they have quite likely become
“gravitationally locked” to the star, always with one side of the
planets facing the star, much as it is always the same side of Earth’s
moon facing Earth. That would mean one side would be warmer, but an
atmosphere would distribute heat, and the scientists said that would not
be an insurmountable obstacle for life.
For
a person standing on one of the planets, it would be a dim environment,
with perhaps only about one two-hundredth the light that we see from
the sun on Earth, Dr. Triaud said. (That would still be brighter than
the moon at night.) The star would be far bigger. On Trappist-1f, the
fifth planet, the star would be three times as wide as the sun seen from
Earth.
As for the color of the star, “we had a debate about that,” Dr. Triaud said.
Some
of the scientists expected a deep red, but with most of the star’s
light emitted at infrared wavelengths and out of view of human eyes,
perhaps a person would “see something more salmon-y,” Dr. Triaud said.
NASA released a poster illustrating what the sky of the fourth planet might look like.
If
observations reveal oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere, that could point
to photosynthesis of plants — although not conclusively. But oxygen
together with methane, ozone and carbon dioxide, particularly in certain
proportions, “would tell us that there is life with 99 percent
confidence,” Dr. Gillon said.
Astronomers
expect that a few decades of technological advances are needed before
similar observations can be made of Earthlike planets around larger,
brighter sunlike stars.
Dr. Triaud said that if there is life around Trappist-1, “then it’s good we didn’t wait too long.”
“If there isn’t, then we have learned something quite deep about where life can emerge,” he continued.
The
discovery might also mean that scientists who have been searching for
radio signals from alien civilizations might also have been searching in
the wrong places if most habitable planets orbit dwarfs, which live far
longer than larger stars like the sun.
The SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., is using the Allen Telescope Array, a group of 42 radio dishes in California, to scrutinize 20,000 red dwarfs. “This result is kind of a justification for that project,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the institute.
“If you’re looking for complex biology — intelligent aliens that might take a long time to evolve from pond scum — older could be better,” Dr. Shostak said. “It seems a good bet that the majority of clever beings populating the universe look up to see a dim, reddish sun hanging in their sky. And at least they wouldn’t have to worry about sun block.”
Venera 1 (Russian: Венера-1 meaning Venus 1), also known as Venera-1VA No.2 and occasionally in the West as Sputnik 8 was the first spacecraft to fly past Venus, as part of the Soviet Union’s Venera programme. Launched in February 1961, it flew past Venus on 19 May of the same year; however, radio contact with the probe was lost before the flyby, resulting in it returning no data.
Spacecraft
Venera 1 was a 643.5-kilogram (1,419 lb) probe consisting of a cylindrical body 1.05 metres (3 ft 5 in) in diameter topped by a dome, totalling 2.035 metres (6 ft 8.1 in) in height. This was pressurized to 1.2 standard atmospheres (120 kPa) with dry nitrogen, with internal fans to maintain even distribution of heat. Two solar panels extended from the cylinder, charging a bank of silver-zinc batteries. A 2-metre parabolic wire-mesh antenna was designed to send data from Venus to Earth on a frequency of 922.8 MHz. A 2.4-metre antenna boom was used to transmit short-wave signals during the near-Earth phase of the mission. Semidirectional quadrupole antennas mounted on the solar panels provided routine telemetry and telecommand contact with Earth during the mission, on a circularly-polarized decimetre radio band.
The probe was equipped with scientific instruments including a flux-gate magnetometer attached to the antenna boom, two ion traps to measure solar wind, micrometeorite detectors, and Geiger counter tubes and a sodium iodide scintillator for measurement of cosmic radiation. An experiment attached to one solar panel measured temperatures of experimental coatings. Infrared and/or ultraviolet radiometers may have been included. The dome contained a KDU-414 engine used for mid-course corrections. Temperature control was achieved by motorized thermal shutters.
During most of its flight, Venera 1 was spin stabilized. It was the first spacecraft designed to perform mid-course corrections, by entering a mode of 3-axis stabilization, fixing on the Sun and the star Canopus. Had it reached Venus, it would have entered another mode of 3-axis stabilization, fixing on the Sun and Earth, and using for the first time a parabolic antenna to relay data.
Launch
Venera 1 was the second of two attempts to launch a probe to Venus in February 1961, immediately following the launch of its sister ship Venera-1VA No.1, which failed to leave Earth orbit. Soviet experts launched Venera-1 using a Molniya carrier rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The launch took place at 00:34:36 UTC on 12 February 1961.
The spacecraft, along with the rocket’s Blok-L upper stage, were initially placed into a 229 × 282 km low Earth orbit, before the upper stage fired to place Venera 1 into a heliocentric orbit, directed towards Venus. The 11D33 engine was the world’s first staged-combustion-cycle rocket engine, and also the first use of an ullage engine to allow a liquid-fuel rocket engine to start in space.
Failure
Three successful telemetry sessions were conducted, gathering solar-wind and cosmic-ray data near Earth, at the Earth’s Magnetopause, and on February 19 at a distance of 1,900,000 km (1,200,000 mi). After discovering the solar wind with Luna 2, Venera 1 provided the first verification that this plasma was uniformly present in deep space. Seven days later, the next scheduled telemetry session failed to occur. On May 19, 1961, Venera 1 passed within 100,000 km (62,000 mi) of Venus. With the help of the British radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, some weak signals from Venera 1 may have been detected in June. Soviet engineers believed that Venera 1 failed due to the overheating of a solar-direction sensor.
