This is CBS. I on the world. I'm John Batchel. In the news, a failed Soviet Union Venus lander, long space odyssey comes to an end. Cosmos 482 crashed to Earth, May 10th, after circling the Earth more than five decades.

And we get in our time machine, David Livingston, my colleague and co-host, here on Hotel

Mars, and travel back to the launch of a Venus probe, Venera 72A and Venera 72A and Veneira 72B. Venera means Venus in Russian.

And we welcome the man who keeps the Russian space web with an enormous amount of rich immaterial about these probes once upon a time.

And it totally exact. It's Russian spaceweb.com, a subscription site,

most worthwhile, especially if your childhood and young manhood was spent in the Cold War, because

it helps us interpret what was going on then and what it means now for our space probes.

Roscosmos was number one in the world in 1972.

Anatoly, welcome.

These were Venus probes and the one has landed.

What was the mission?

What did they hope to achieve?

What did they achieve with these two launches? Good evening to you.

Hello, John. So, Venera 72 project, as they called it inside the industry, but we know it, and mostly to the public, it was known as Venera 7 and Venerera 8, which were launched in 1772.

There were only two probes in a long series of spacecraft, which Soviet Union launched

toward Venus starting in early 60s, and this program continued well into 70s and 80s,

during basically, until the end of the Soviet Union, this program continued.

And Venera 72 project was especially important. It was kind of milestone within this long series of probes, because that was the period when the Soviet Union essentially mastered landing on Venus, which had extremely,

as they found out, actually, hard way, actually using that spacecraft, had extremely difficult

conditions on the surface, first of all, temperature, extremely high hundreds of degrees

Celsius, and very high pressure as well, which would normally,

any no spacecraft designed traditionally to launch in Earth orbit would survive that.

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