I thought I was a total space-nerd during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but I seemed to have missed the part where Russians sent probes and landers to Venus and took extraordinary images of the surface. Like this one, :
Here's a screen capture of those distant hills :
The Russian 'Venera' missions reached the surface of Venus at least 10 times, before 1985.
For someone who stared for a few hundreds of hours at the colour front page of a newspaper showing the surface of Mars, stuck to my bedroom wall, I'm stunned I knew so little about the Russians on Venus.
Obviously I was reading the wrong books. Back then.
