[ibrault]

Not a lander but NASA has 2 potential Venus missions in their proposed Discovery missions! [0]

In regards to why not a lander: I would guess it's because it's not really necessary? Orbiters (like the proposed ones above) can gather all of the science that's really necessary to study a planet like Venus. Landers are useful to study more micro-scale science to, for example, search for life (see the Mars rovers/landers and the proposed Europa lander). And orbiters are significantly cheaper and easier to make. Landing on Mars is really really really hard! I can assume it would only be harder on Venus.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-four-possibl...

[skykooler]

Landing on Venus is actually fairly easy; the atmosphere is so thick that even with a minimum of parachutes, a lander will touch down at a comfortably slow velocity. The hard part is keeping it cool enough to function; all the Soviet landers used a phase-change material to cool them, which worked for a little while until it had all changed phase at which point they rapidly overheated. Keeping a lander operating for more than a couple hours is a very difficult engineering challenge for that reason.

[ryandrake]

> Landing on Venus is actually fairly easy; the atmosphere is so thick that even with a minimum of parachutes, a lander will touch down at a comfortably slow velocity.

Doesn’t the thick atmosphere also mean a lot more mass to slam into at orbital speed when starting to enter it? Seems like it’s a double edged sword.

[crispyambulance]

There were a number of Soviet missions that deployed a balloon-based probe to Venus. These were called the "Vega" missions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program).

I think that's more practical. At a high enough altitude, one doesn't have to deal with extreme pressure and temperature-- just sulfuric acid as rain?