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On this day in space! May 20, 1978: NASA launches Pioneer Venus Orbiter

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On May 20, 1978, NASA launched a spacecraft to Venus.

On May 20, 1978, NASA launched a spacecraft to Venus. The mission was called Pioneer-Venus 1, but it’s also known as the Pioneer Venus Orbiter.

This was the first of two spacecraft that made up the Pioneer Venus mission. Pioneer Venus 2 launched a couple months later, and that spacecraft dropped five probes onto the surface of Venus. NASA called this the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe. The orbiter was designed to study the atmosphere of Venus. It was a solar-powered cylinder about the size of a hot tub.

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NASA's Pioneer Venus Orbiter is seen undergoing final assembly and checkout (at left).and being launched on May 20, 1978. (Image credit: NASA)
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The mission launched from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas-Centaur rocket and reached Venus about six months later. While orbiting Venus, it measured the structure of the upper atmosphere and studied how the solar wind interacts with its ionosphere and magnetic field. It also detected gamma-ray bursts and made ultraviolet observations of comets.

Pioneer Venus 1 continued to beam back data for 14 years before its decaying orbit sent it into Venus’s atmosphere, where it was destroyed.

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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