For the gaps in my knowledge.
It was only recently that I learned that, in 1984, the then Soviet Union landed a probe on VENUS and took pictures. Until now I've never seen these pictures of another planet which have been around for nearly thirty years. In the event that you as well have been somehow deprived of this information solely on the basis that it was mostly ignored as a fact their competitors didn't want to acknowledge, here's a shot of our next door neighbor closer to the sun:
From Wiki:
The Venera (Cyrillic: Венера) series probes were developed by the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1984 to gather data from Venus, Venera being the Russian name for Venus. As with some of the Soviet Union's other planetary probes, the later versions were launched in pairs with a second vehicle being launched soon after the first of the pair.
Ten probes from the Venera series successfully landed on Venus and transmitted data from the surface, including the two Vega program and Venera-Halley probes. In addition, thirteen Venera probes successfully transmitted data from the atmosphere of Venus.
Among the other results, probes of the series became the first man-made devices to enter the atmosphere of another planet (Venera 4 on October 18, 1967), to make a soft landing on another planet (Venera 7 on December 15, 1970), to return images from the planetary surface (Venera 9 on June 8, 1975), and to perform high-resolution radar mapping studies of Venus (Venera 15 on June 2, 1983). So, the entire series could be considered highly successful. Unfortunately the surface conditions on Venus are extreme, which meant that the probes only survived on the surface for a duration of 23 minutes (initial probes) up to about two hours (final probes).
