The first spacecraft to go to Venus was in 1962 (from Russia), but the planet presents major difficulties for visitors from Earth: the pressure of Venus's atmosphere at the surface is 90 times what it is on Earth (about the same as the pressure at a depth of 1 km in Earth's oceans), is composed mostly of carbon dioxide and there are several layers of clouds many kilometres thick composed of sulfuric acid (which completely obscure our view of the surface). This dense atmosphere produces a run-away greenhouse effect that raises Venus's surface temperature to over 740 Kelvin (hot enough to melt lead and actually hotter than the surface of Mercury despite being nearly twice as far from the Sun).
Anything from Earth that lands on Venus doesn't last very long.
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