[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.

[crubier]

The upper layer of the atmosphere are not denser than the upper layer of the earth atmosphere, so it does not make aerocapture more difficult. It’s just that the atmosphere is “deeper”: going down, it starts thin, and then gradually densifies until reaching earth conditions at around 50km, then you keep going down in thicker and thicker atmosphere, which means you don’t need big parachutes.