Russia's top space official tried to claim that the planet Venus belongs to the Kremlin
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The head of the Russian space agency has staked the country's claim on Venus, saying this week that it is a "Russian planet."
Dmitry Rogozin, who is the director general of Russian space corporation Roscosmos, revealed that the country plans to send its own mission to Venus.
This would be on top of an already-proposed joint venture with the United States called "Venera-D" that would include sending an uncrewed space mission to the planet in either 2026 or 2031."Resuming Venus exploration is on our agenda. We think that Venus is a Russian planet, so we shouldn't lag behind," he added, CNN reported.
Rogozin's comments come days after new research suggested that a gas on Earth called phosphine had also been detected in the atmosphere of Venus, meaning the planet's clouds could be harboring microbial life.In the study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, Cardiff University professor Jane Greaves and her team said that their discovery makes Venus a new area of interest.
"Our hoped-for impact in the planetaryThe planet's atmosphere is made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide and is the second brightest object in the night sky, after the moon.
The Soviet Union became the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on Venus in 1970. The Venera 7 was one of many probes to be sent to the planet and became the first to transmit data from there back to Earth.
Although it made a successful soft landing, it melted within seconds.Its successor Venera 9 — also launched by the Russians — took the first and only image of the Venusian surface from the ground-level perspective in 1975.
The country plans to send its own mission to Venus between 2021 and 2030, Rogozin said, according to CNN.
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