50 years ago today, the Venera 7 spacecraft was launched by the Soviet Union, and began traveling toward Venus. Four months later, it became the first spacecraft to soft land on another planet and the first to successfully transmit data from the surface.

After its parachute started to fail it stuck Venus harder than planned. The probe appeared to go silent on impact, but a few weeks later, upon a review of the tapes, 23 minutes of very weak signals were found on them. The probe transmitted the temperature at the surface of Venus to be 475 °C (887 °F) making it inhospitable to humans. (1970)