In October 1975, the Soviet Venera 9 probe survived just 53 minutes on the surface of Venus before the 465°C heat and 92-atmosphere pressure crushed it, but in those 53 minutes it sent back the first photograph ever taken from the surface of another planet — grainy, black-and-white, and showing sharp-edged rocks nobody had expected to still be intact.

In October 1975, the Soviet Venera 9 probe survived just 53 minutes on the surface of Venus before the 465°C heat and 92-atmosphere pressure crushed it, but in those 53 minutes it sent back the first photograph ever taken from the surface of another planet — grainy, black-and-white, and showing sharp-edged rocks nobody had expected to still be intact.

On October 22, 1975, a titanium sphere settled onto a hillside on Venus, popped open a lens cap, and started scanning. Fifty-three minutes later, the relay window ended and the signal cut out — the lander was cooking from the outside in by heat approaching 470°C, squeezed by an atmosphere weighing roughly 92 times what presses down on a beach on Earth. But in those 53 minutes, Venera 9 sent back the first photograph ever taken from the surface o…

In 1982 the Soviet Union landed a probe on the surface of Venus that survived 127 minutes in heat that melts lead and pressure dense enough to crush a submarine — long enough to scan back two panoramas of flat basaltic rock under an orange-tinted sky before the heat finally ended the mission

The engineers who built the Venera 13 lander did not expect it to last very long. They had built it, over the course of several years, to survive one of the most actively destructive environments in the solar system — the surface of the planet Venus, where the temperature is hot enough to melt lead and the atmospheric pressure is roughly equivalent to being nine hundred metres underwater. The lander was engineered with an insulated titanium pres…