The first spacecraft to make a soft landing on another planet was Soviet.
On 15 December 1970 Venera 7 touched down on Venus and transmitted from the surface for about 20 minutes: it was 475 °C there.
More amazing facts
- 1968 Almost every high jumper today goes over the bar backwards, thanks to one American.
- 1969 The computer that guided Apollo to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of working memory: 2,048 sixteen-bit words of magnetic core.
- 1969 The first session on ARPANET, the internet's ancestor, crashed after two letters.
- 1969 · 1971 The first microprocessor was ordered for a Japanese calculator.
- 1971 In 1971 astronaut Alan Shepard played golf on the Moon.
- 1971 The US–China thaw began when an American table-tennis player missed his bus. At the 1971 World Championships in Nagoya, Glenn Cowan hopped on the Chinese team's bus, where world champion Zhuang Zedong struck up a conversation.