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The Space Race: Difference between revisions
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On the Soviet side, aside from the very successful series of the Moon landers, which generally should be counted as a part of the Moon Race, there were a number of the unmanned probes as well. The most extensive and successful of them was the ''Venera'' (Venus) series of probes launched in [[The Seventies]] and [[The Eighties]] that finally conclusively proved what a [[Death World]] Venus really is. the first of these generally coincided with the American Mariner launches and were intended to study the Venusian atmosphere, determining it's composition was mostly carbon dioxide and ''sulfuric acid''. No one, however, expected the tremendous pressure of this atmosphere, and the probes died when they exceeded their ''[[Wrong Genre Savvy|crush depth]]''. Submarine designers were then consulted, and later probes proved much more resilient and even managed to land, transmitting images of the barren stony desert with some mysterious (and possibly moving) rocks.
''Venera'' series was continued with an equally successful ''[[Portmanteau Series Nickname|Vega]]'' series (a portmanteau of VEnus+[[Spell My Name With an "S"|HAlley]]'s comet), utilizing similar hardware, which was aimed at the further study of the Venusian atmosphere by the means of weather balloons, and, on the second leg of their journey, a flyby of the Comet Halley. Both spacecraft were quite successful, transmitting the first images of a comet's core and spectroscopy measurements of its coma.
Latter studies, however, hit a roadblock. A curious peculiarity of the Soviet unmanned program is that while it was quite successful with the inner Solar System, for some reason, it invariably failed when Mars was concerned. The aforementioned Mars probe that lost contact with the Earth shortly after landing was only the tip of the iceberg, it was followed by several other failed probes.
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