Kurt Groetsch @ OldTasty.com

I’ve been fascinated by the photos that have been coming back from Mars, as I’m sure many others are. And how can one not marvel at images like this (4MB high-res image here). But did you know that between 1965 and 1983, the Soviet Union sent 12 probes and landers to Venus, a much less hospitable environment than that of Mars? Of those 12, eight landed successfully and four managed to survive the high pressure (equal to that of 90 earth atmospheres) and temperatures (around 470º C) to send back photographs of the Venusian surface, photographs which NASA is kind enough to make available here, here, here and here (scroll to the bottom of the pages to see the images). Radar images of the planet’s surface can be found in the Magellan Mission image catalog, remarkable in their own right, but a little less dramatic as they don’t actually come from the surface.