What we left at Venus

Whatever stopped at Venus instead of flying past is still there in some form: on the ground, scattered across it in pieces, burned into its air or circling it with a dead radio. Jonathan McDowell's General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects, updated on 2 November 2026, lists 59 objects that ended their flights on or in Venus between 1 March 1966 and 2015, and it carries seven more as still in orbit. The 59 are a mixed lot: ten Soviet landers, seven capsules and probes that were silent before or at impact, one American probe that kept talking after it hit, seven carrier buses, sixteen heat-shield halves, two capsule lids, a handful of small Pioneer Venus parts, two balloons, three orbiters and a spent motor still attached to one of them. Parachutes and camera covers are not in the catalogue at all. This page is the inventory behind the globe's pins.

Ten landers reached the surface and sent data from it, all of them Soviet: Venera 7 in December 1970, Venera 8, Venera 9 and 10, Venera 11 and 12, Venera 13 and 14 and the two Vega landers in June 1985. The Pioneer Venus Multiprobe added one more working object on the ground without meaning to. Its Day Probe came down without a parachute, yet it transmitted for 67 minutes 37 seconds after it hit (NSSDCA and Siddiqi; the times in the Planetary Data System's summary table give 67 minutes 35 seconds). Siddiqi counts the Night Probe, whose signal outlived its impact by two seconds, as a second survivor.

How precisely those places are known varies widely. Seven sites (Venera 8, 9, 10, 13 and 14 and both Vegas) have landing circles from Akim and Stepanyants (1993), which A. M. Abdrakhimov's 2001 geological mapping abstracts plot on Magellan mosaics, each with the same caveat: 'Radius of ellipse of probable error in the lander position is 150 km'. For Venera 7, 11 and 12 the published positions, as in NSSDCA's catalogue, are only whole degrees. Catalogues disagree too: for Vega 2, NSSDCA prints 8.5° S, 164.5° E, about 1,390 km from the Akim and Stepanyants centre of 7.14° S, 177.67° E, while McDowell's lander list gives 6.45° S, 181.08° E, some 365 km the other way. None of these positions has been checked against an image: Magellan, which mapped the surface at better than 300 m on average according to JPL, could not show an object the size of a Venera lander, whose braking disc is about 2 m across.

Four Soviet capsules never reached the ground working. Venera 3 fell silent on 16 February 1966 and struck the night side on 1 March, so its impact point is a computed box: 20° N to 30° S and 60° to 80° E in NSSDCA's catalogue, 20° S to 20° N over the same longitudes in Asif Siddiqi's NASA chronicle. NSSDCA calls Venera 3 the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet. Venera 4 sent data for 93 minutes on its parachute and went quiet high above the ground, at 28 km by Siddiqi's account and roughly 25 km by NSSDCA's. NSSDCA places it over 19° N, 38° E and Siddiqi at 19° N, 36° E, and the cause of the silence is argued: Siddiqi blames pressure and heat, while Don P. Mitchell thinks the 100-minute battery simply ran out, and NSSDCA allows either. Venera 5 and 6 were built to go deeper and were crushed at about 18 km, over 3° S, 18° E and 5° S, 23° E according to NSSDCA.

On 9 December 1978 the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe spread five objects across both hemispheres. The Planetary Data System's summary table gives impact points of 4.4° N, 304.0° E for the Large Probe, 59.3° N, 4.8° E for the North Probe, 31.3° S, 317.0° E for the Day Probe and 28.7° S, 56.7° E for the Night Probe, and it puts the bus, which carried no heat shield, at 37.9° S, 290.9° E when its signal stopped at about 110 km. The table gives no error bars, and Siddiqi rounds the small-probe sites to whole degrees.

From Venera 3 to Venera 8 the carriers did not fly past (Venera 1 and 2 had). Venera 3's bus struck the planet with its capsule, and from Venera 4 to Venera 8 each bus released its capsule and then followed it into the atmosphere, where McDowell's catalogue ends each of them. NPO Lavochkin says the Venera 4 bus kept sending telemetry and science for some time before it was destroyed, and NSSDCA says the Venera 8 bus sent data 'until entering the atmosphere and incinerating as planned'. How much of any bus reached the ground is unknown. The pattern changed in 1975, when the Venera 9 and 10 buses braked into orbit. The Venera 11 to 14 and Vega carriers flew past, relayed their landers' signals and went on round the Sun, the Vegas on to Halley's Comet.

Landing on Venus meant shedding a shell. The Venera 9 to 14 landers and both Vegas came down inside a spherical entry pod about 2.4 m across that split into two halves once the air had done the braking. Venera 9 and 10 dropped their parachutes at about 50 km and Venera 11 and 12 theirs at 49 km (Mitchell), Venera 14 at about 47 km (NPO Lavochkin). McDowell catalogues each of the sixteen shell halves as its own object at 485 kg, a figure he marks as uncertain. The smaller first-generation capsules dropped less: McDowell lists a 20 kg capsule lid for each of Venera 7 and 8, and NSSDCA describes Venera 8's top shell being jettisoned on entry to release its parachute. Venera 8 also carried a second antenna meant to lie beside it, a flat washer with four folding petals that NPO Lavochkin designed to be thrown out after landing and to rest on one face, so that a gravity switch could transmit from the side facing the sky. The sources describe the design; none says whether it deployed.

Then there are the lens caps. Each camera window on the Venera 9 to 14 landers sat under a cover that pyrotechnic charges were meant to blow off after touchdown. On Venera 9 and 10, Mitchell writes, one cover on each lander stuck, so each left one cover on the ground and kept the other. On Venera 11 and 12 every cover stayed on, held down by pressure after a seal formed, and neither lander returned a picture. NPO Lavochkin ran 78 tests of the release for the next pair, and this time it worked: on Venera 14 the telephotometer covers came off after the first four minutes on the ground. In the Venera 13 picture at the top of this page, the pale half-shell lying beside the toothed landing ring appears to be one of them, and Mitchell points out a pentagonal pennant fastened to the same ring.

The American probes shed hardware too. NSSDCA's record for the Pioneer Large Probe has its heat shield jettisoned at 67 km and its parachute at about 45 km, pieces McDowell catalogues as an aft cover with its chute (about 10 kg) and a deceleration module (about 90 kg). He adds six despin weights of about a kilogram each from the three small probes, and two mass-spectrometer caps, one from the Large Probe and one released by the bus a day before it entered.

Each Vega descent sphere also carried a balloon, and releasing it scattered a train of parts. In NPO Lavochkin's sequence, the upper half of the heat shield was pulled away on its own parachute with the balloon package inside. The package then dropped out under a stabilising parachute and a main one, and its ring-shaped container was cut apart so that the lower half-ring, which served as ballast, pulled the gondola, tether and envelope out behind it. Once filling was done, the parachute and helium system dropped off, and later the ballast. NSSDCA puts the whole stowed system at 120 kg and the floating balloon at 21.5 kg, so roughly 100 kg per Vega fell to the surface in pieces, by azmth's subtraction. NSSDCA's pages disagree on the altitude: 54 km for deployment in the Vega 2 lander record, 61 km for extraction and 54 km for inflation in the balloon records.

Once aloft, the Vega balloons floated for about 46.5 hours at 53 to 54 km until their batteries ran down, and where they ended up is not known. NSSDCA's Vega 1 balloon record says so: 'It is not known how much further the balloon travelled after the final communication.' Its Vega 2 lander record, by contrast, says the balloon entered the day side after two days and 'expanded and burst due to solar heating'. Two sets of end points circulate, from different kinds of measurement. The familiar positions, 8.1° N, 68.8° E and 7.5° S, 76.3° E at the last radio sessions at 00:38 UT on 13 and 17 June 1985, are NSSDCA's, from a solution in which each balloon drifts 'at nearly constant latitude'. The tracks measured by very long baseline interferometry, good to about 10 km according to Sagdeev and colleagues (1992) and archived in the Planetary Data System, end about four and a half hours earlier, at 9.09° N, 77.41° E and 3.22° S, 83.99° E. For Vega 2 the measured track had wandered about 4° north of NSSDCA's latitude.

Three orbiters ended in the atmosphere, and azmth found no published entry point for any of them. Pioneer Venus Orbiter ran out of fuel while its low point was sinking. R. J. Strangeway records that 'No telemetry was received from the spacecraft after periapsis on orbit 5056 (October 8, 1992)'. Its last measured low point, on orbit 5055 at 19:46 UT on 7 October 1992, was 131 km above 11.87° S, 89.2° E in the Planetary Data System's ephemeris (the file names no direction; its solar zenith angle fits east). McDowell dates the re-entry itself to 22 October 1992. Magellan was driven into the upper air on purpose on 11 October 1994 for a last aerodynamics experiment; contact ended at 10:02 UT the next day, and the project's final report expected it to 'land on Venus by 1:00 PM PDT Thursday, October 13, 1994'. Venus Express was declared ended in December 2014 and faded out. ESA last heard its signal on 19 January 2015, and its mission manager said at the time that the spacecraft 'may continue orbiting Venus but under conditions which do not allow us to receive a signal'. McDowell's catalogue enters its re-entry as '2015 Q2?'.

Seven objects may still be up there. McDowell's catalogue gives the status 'in orbit', with no end date, to the orbiters of Venera 9, 10, 15 and 16, to Akatsuki, to the spent Star 48B motor that braked Magellan into orbit and to a one-kilogram instrument cap from Pioneer Venus Orbiter. JPL's pre-launch guide gives the motor as 2,146 kg full, 2,014 kg of it propellant, which leaves a casing of about 130 kg by azmth's subtraction. The Venera 9 and 10 orbiters were built to work for three months; NPO Lavochkin says Venera 9's lasted until 27 April 1976. The radar mappers of Venera 15 and 16 fell silent in January and June 1985 when their attitude-control nitrogen was gone, Venera 16 after it obeyed a command meant for Vega 1. While they worked, the Sun's pull kept lifting their low points, and O. N. Rzhiga writes that the orbits had to be corrected with the engine. The catalogue's 'in orbit' means only that no end has been reported; azmth found no operator account of these orbits and no one tracking them.

Akatsuki, the latest arrival to stay, entered orbit in December 2015; McDowell's register lists no Venus orbit insertion since. JAXA lost contact at the end of April 2024, after a long spell in a control mode with poor attitude accuracy, and carried out the transmitter shutdown procedure from 09:00 JST on 18 September 2025. Because the link was already dead, there is no way to confirm the command was received. JPL's Horizons system, checked on 4 November 2026, fits its trajectory to tracking only up to 26 April 2024 and predicts no further than 24 August 2025. JAXA's closing release and its report of 13 July 2026 give only a summary orbit (about 1,000 km by 360,000 to 370,000 km, period about 11 days) and say nothing about its lifetime or an eventual entry, so azmth treats Akatsuki as presumed in orbit and untracked.

Aboard it are about 260,000 messages. Between 23 October 2009 and 10 January 2010 JAXA collected 260,214 entries, 57,378 of them through the Planetary Society. JAXA's report to the Space Activities Commission of 10 February 2010 says the data would be printed on 100 aluminium plates and fixed to the spacecraft as balance weights at three places; in an interview published by ITmedia the same month, JAXA staff said the count would probably come out at about 90 plates. JAXA set aside three plates for drawings of the virtual singer Hatsune Miku after 13,849 fans signed one group entry.

Soviet probes carried pennants as well. NSSDCA's record for Venera 3 lists 'medallions bearing the coat of arms of the U.S.S.R.', and a 2025 feature in Argumenty i Fakty describes a small metal globe of the Earth and a pennant with the Soviet coat of arms inside the 90 cm capsule. Venera 5 and 6 each took 'a medallion bearing the coat of arms of the U.S.S.R. and a bas-relief of V.I. Lenin' (NSSDCA), and the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation keeps photographs of the Lenin and coat-of-arms pennants mounted on the outside of the Venera 7 capsule. Mitchell writes that they were titanium with heat-resistant polysiloxane enamels, and that Venera 9 to 14 carried identical pennants apart from names and years. The emblems went wherever their capsules went: some to the surface, some crushed in the air.

Past Venus, rather than at it, went the rocket stages. McDowell's heliocentric catalogue follows fifteen spent upper stages into the planet's sphere of influence behind their payloads, from the Blok L that launched Venera 1 in 1961 to the Fregat of Venus Express in 2006. Each then passes back into orbit around the Sun, and most of the dates carry question marks.

Anyone who wants to see this hardware has to settle for its siblings on Earth. NPO Lavochkin's own museum at Khimki holds 26 spacecraft, which it describes as genuine craft and full-scale mockups built from test articles and spare flight parts. Ralph Lorenz's photographs there, released through the Planetary Data System, show a Vega lander with its brown entry shell cut away, and his 2017 captions place full-size mockups of a Vega balloon with its gondola, and of a Vega carrier, on display at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center. In Washington the National Air and Space Museum shows the Mariner 10 flight spare, transferred from JPL in 1982, and a full-scale Mariner 2 that JPL engineers assembled from spares and test components; the museum's records, checked on 4 November 2026, list both on display. A RIA Novosti photograph in Argumenty i Fakty shows a Venera 3 exhibit in the Kosmos pavilion at VDNKh in Moscow.

Whether any of it survives is a newer question. On 28 April 2026 Geoarchaeology published 'Planetary Geoarchaeology of Venus' by Forassiepi, Holcomb, Pajola, Jorayev and Andrzejewski, which treats the landing and impact sites as archaeological contexts. Its abstract counts 'the remains of landers and probes from 15 space missions concentrated between 1965 and 1985', a number that fits Venera 3 to 14, the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe and the two Vegas, and it pushes back on the assumption that Venus quickly erases what lands there. Beryllium, Kapton and silicone parts are probably gone, the authors argue, but titanium, ceramic and aluminium structure is likely preserved, 'albeit oxidized, corroded, and potentially deformed', and they work through the Pioneer Day Probe as a case study. The article is closed access, so its site table could not be compared with this page.

Even the ground under the landers is being reread. In August 2026 the planetary geologist Alexander Basilevsky of the Vernadsky Institute told Moskovsky Komsomolets that the Venera landers of the 1970s most often came down on fine ejecta blown downwind from impact craters into radar-dark parabolas, and that no Soviet lander set down between such deposits; drilling a few decimetres, they sampled that blanket and never reached the older rock beneath. The paper appeared in Solar System Research in May 2026. The surface of Venus and landing on Venus pages take that further.