Venera 13 Survived Venus's Inferno for 127 Minutes, Returning Basaltic Panoramas
In March 1982, the Soviet Venera 13 lander survived 127 minutes on Venus—nearly four times its 32-minute design life—enduring 457°C heat and 89 atm pressure to return two color panoramas of flat basaltic rock under an orange sky and gather surface and atmospheric data; this long-lived surface mission remains one of humanity’s clearest records of Venus, and no surface mission has succeeded since Vega 1985.