Visiting Venus

This is very interesting. NASA has developed electronics to withstand the conditions on Venus. Venus is closer than Mars, but because the atmosphere is so dense and the temperature so high -- it's about 90 earth atmospheres (like being 3,000 feet underwater) and hotter than Mercury -- it's a tad difficult to send anything to land there. The article points out that Venera 13 lasted 127 minutes on the surface, and that's the record. But if there are new forms of electronics that can survive there, the possibilities open up. Once, I was googling to find out the highest mountain on Venus (Maxwell Montes, 11 km high or 6.8 miles elevation) to see if we have the technology to survive there. The temperature there would only be 716 degrees Fahrenheit and the density would only be 44 earth atmospheres. I note that the Exosuit is good to about 30 atmospheres (equivalent to about 1,000 feet underwater). However, if we had a motive, I'm confident the technology would be forthcoming. Of course if your Venus suit failed ... that ... that would suck. At any rate, if we have electronics we can put off sending people down there right away. We can have a manned habitat in orbit that sends down probes, even probes that can return. Or we can even go further and have never-landing aircraft in Venus's atmosphere. In fact, that would probably be the closest to earth conditions anywhere in the solar system. If you had the aircraft at the elevation that's one atmosphere, you'd just need a breathing mask to wander out on the lanai. Geoffrey Landis, NASA scientist and science-fiction author, has written about this possibility.