On 1 March 1982, the Soviet Venera 13 lander punched through Venus’s sulfuric-acid clouds and slammed onto a basaltic plain east of Phoebe Regio — a world of 465 °C heat and 89 atmospheres of pressure, hot enough to melt lead and crush a submarine. Designed to last 32 minutes, it survived 127, drilling a soil sample, analyzing its chemistry, and returning the first color photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet. Those orange-lit slabs of volcanic rock, a discarded lens cap, and the lander’s own arm remain among the only images humanity has ever received from the Venusian ground. Credit: USSR