Venus has been in the spotlight before. From the 1960s to the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union targeted the planet frequently with its Venera and Vega programs, setting a number of exploration milestones along the way (despite a number of launch failures).
In October 1967, for example, Venera 4 became the first probe to send data back from another planet’s atmosphere, discovering that Venus’ surface is incredibly hot, and its air is surprisingly thick. Venera 7 made the first successful soft landing on a planet other than Earth three years later. In 1982, the Venera 13 lander became the first to record audio on the surface of another planet (a feat recently replicated on Mars by NASA’s Perseverance rover). In the mid-1980s, the Vega 1 and Vega 2 missions successfully deployed balloon probes in Venus’s thick atmosphere, marking yet another off-Earth first.
