{"id":553,"date":"2011-02-12T13:04:28","date_gmt":"2011-02-12T13:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress65\/?p=553"},"modified":"2011-02-12T13:04:28","modified_gmt":"2011-02-12T13:04:28","slug":"venus-and-eros-space-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/venus-and-eros-space-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Venus and Eros in Space History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifty years ago today — February 12, 1961 — the Soviet Union launched the Venera-1 probe from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n(Venera-1. Image from NASA’s National Space Science Data Center.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\nVenera-1<\/a>, or the “Venus-1 Automatic Interplanetary Station,” was the first spacecraft to fly by Venus. Even though telemetry contact with the spacecraft was lost on March 4th, making the mid-course corrections impossible, around May 19th Venera-1 flew within 100,000 km (62,000 mi) of the cloud-shrouded planet.<\/p>\n

From Venus to Eros …<\/p>\n

Forty years later, on this date in 2001, the NEAR<\/a> spacecraft — i.e., the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft — touched down successfully on the asteroid Eros (even though the vehicle was not designed as a lander). On its way to touchdown, NEAR sent back high-resolution close-up images of the asteroid’s surface.<\/p>\n

The Roman goddess of love, and the Greek god of love — a good day in space history for this Valentine’s weekend!<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifty years ago today — February 12, 1961 — the Soviet Union launched the Venera-1 probe from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. (Venera-1. Image from NASA’s National Space Science Data Center.) Venera-1, or the “Venus-1 Automatic Interplanetary Station,” was the first spacecraft to fly by Venus. Even though telemetry contact with the \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[26,11,120],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space","tag-launch","tag-space-history","tag-venus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}