Crushing is manageable but melting is the issue. At this point all planned missions are still orbiters, so Venus will still not have the wealth of in-situ data

Crushing is manageable but melting is the issue. At this point all planned missions are still orbiters, so Venus will still not have the wealth of in-situ data that Mars does. There are two major concepts that I found really fun: 1) airships and 2) steampunk rovers. Airships: 2018 JPL: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/aerial-platforms-for-the-scientific-exploration-of-venus/ https://science.nasa.gov/resource/aerial-platforms-for-the-s... 2020s report on in-situ sampling using airships as mothership https://kiss.caltech.edu/final_reports/Venus_In_Situ_Final_Report.pdf https://kiss.caltech.edu/final_reports/Venus_In_Situ_Final_R... Clockwork rover for long-lived venus exploration: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/a-clockwork-rover-for-venus/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/a-clockwork-rover-for-venus/ I don't think that last one was (too) serious, but it was interesting to sus out the costs/benefits at TRL1-2 at least. AGU is a fairly open, very accessible conference for tracking progress on these. Here's a short paper on venus long lived surface missions. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.03365 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.03365