Soviet Venus Images (2004)
It's wild we have any images of the surface of Venus at all given how hostile Venus is. Given how hostile it is, it seems unlikely we'll go back anytime soon. These images were really a product of the Cold War where the US focused on Mars.<p>It's worth noting that Venus is still probably a better terraforming target than Mars [1]. This romantic notion of Mars has rooted itself deeply at this point (eg with Elon Musk) but Mars is basically a more distant and inconvenient Moon. Almost no atmosphere (in fact, just enough because dust storms will occasionally just coat all your equipment), the Sun is weaker and gravity is still very low.<p>Venus's atmosphere is about 3% nitrogen and 97% CO2. It has about 100x the atmosphere of Earth, which means there's actually more atmospheric nitrogen than on Earth. And abundant CO2 means oxygen is abundant.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I</a>