Nuclear Venus Mission
The last probes to reach Venus’ hellish surface were Russia’s Vega 1 and Vega 2 landers in 1985. Each spacecraft lasted about an hour before croaking in the 840-degree-Fahrenheit heat and crushing pressure.
Planetary scientists consider Venus to be an Earth gone wrong and have been itching to go back and study its surface and atmosphere ever since, but NASA has poured its reserves into studying Mars.
In 2006, however, Geoffrey Landis of NASA Glenn Research Center imagined a multibillion-dollar mission to Venus involving a nuclear-powered rover, multiple atmosphere-skimming airplanes and an orbiting mothership (above).
The plan has since been scaled back to just a nuclear-powered lander, and NASA is finally entertaining the idea of a Cythrerean adventure by building an Extreme Environment Test Chamber– a thick-walled device that’s uniquely suited to simulate the punishing conditions on the planet’s surface, among other environments in space.
Image: Venus probe descending to the surface. NASA