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At 464 degrees Celsius, standard silicon electronics stop working in seconds. Venus surface temperature will melt the solder inside your phone and deform the plastic housing before you finish saying "touchdown." The Soviet Venera 13 lander held the surface record at 127 minutes in March 1982, and no spacecraft has come close since. Now a team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands thinks 200 days is possible.
They call it KYTHERA, a lander concept described in a study presented at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March 2026. The number that matters: 2,267. That is how many times longer 200 Earth days is than Venera 13's record. Getting there is not a materials problem or a power problem. It is a heat-transfer problem, and heat-transfer problems have rules.
The physics is straightforward and unforgiving. At the Venus surface, temperature sits around 464 degrees Celsius, and atmospheric pressure is 92 times Earth sea level, equivalent to roughly 1 kilometer of ocean depth. Standard silicon electronics fail below 150 degrees. Even the lead-based solder used in Soviet-era circuits melts at 327 degrees. Venus does not negotiate.
The pressure does more damage than the temperature. At 9.3 megapascals, carbon dioxide becomes supercritical, neither gas nor liquid but something denser that suppresses boiling and prevents conventional evaporative cooling. You cannot run fans. You cannot rely on heat pipes. A cooling system that would dissipate 100 watts through natural convection on Earth does nothing on Venus. The atmosphere itself becomes an insulator rather than a heat sink.
Heat always flows toward cold. Keeping electronics alive on Venus means either blocking the heat out or moving it out faster than it accumulates. The Soviet approach was a sealed pressure vessel: a shell of insulation over an internally pressurized compartment, similar to how a thermos works but in reverse. Venera carried enough refrigerant to survive a couple of hours. That architecture cannot scale to 200 days because the insulation eventually reaches equilibrium with the surrounding atmospheres, and whatever is inside cooks.
The alternative is getting rid of the heat-generating electronics entirely. NASA Glenn Research Center has been testing silicon carbide, a wide-bandgap semiconductor that can operate at temperatures up to 600 degrees Celsius without active cooling. The Long-Lived In-Situ Solar System Explorer (LLISSE) program demonstrated 60 days of continuous operation in simulated Venus surface conditions using silicon carbide electronics, with results published in journals including Progress in Aerospace Sciences. Sixty days is three times the Venera record. It is not 200.
KYTHERA takes the silicon carbide approach and tries to close the remaining gap. The lander would use radioisotope power systems, similar to those flying on Voyager 1 and 2, Cassini-Huygens, and NASA Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. The advantage: no need to reject waste heat from a generator, because radioisotope generators produce electricity with few moving parts and minimal thermal signature. The lander would carry cooling generators whose design borrows from the Venera pressure-vessel concept but uses the radioisotope heat differential as part of the thermal management system.
Two candidate landing sites are on the table. Lakshmi Planum, a high-standing plateau on Venus, offers reduced pressure and temperature conditions relative to the Venus average. Lada Terra is more scientifically compelling: the region may host active volcanism and seismic activity, making it a place where a 200-day instrument package could actually catch something happening rather than just cataloging static geology.
The lander would carry spectroscopy and seismometry instruments, potentially derivatives of hardware from NASA's DAVINCI atmospheric probe mission, modified for sustained surface operations. During descent, the instruments would sample the atmosphere. Once on the ground, they would run continuously for the full mission duration, studying geology, atmospheric chemistry, and surface-atmosphere exchange.
None of this is funded or scheduled. KYTHERA is a concept study, not a mission. The researchers propose a launch window between 2035 and 2037, which is optimistic given that the concept has not been selected by any space agency. But the current pipeline for Venus tells you something: every major mission currently in development is an orbiter or atmospheric probe. NASA's DAVINCI and VERITAS, the European Space Agency's EnVision, India's Shukrayaan-1, the United Arab Emirates Venus mission, and a private effort from Rocket Lab are all designed to study the planet from above or through the clouds. None of them touch the surface. KYTHERA is proposing to do something nobody has even attempted in 44 years.
The implication is worth sitting with. A 200-day surface mission on Venus covers roughly 1.7 Venusian solar days, since a solar day on Venus runs approximately 117 Earth days — sunrise to sunrise. That is 200 consecutive Earth days of uninterrupted instrument operation: weather monitoring, seismic recording, and atmospheric sampling at a single location with no data gaps. It is the difference between reading one page of a book and reading the whole thing. Venus has been a planet of brief, violent glimpses. A successful KYTHERA mission turns it into a continuous record.
The Delft team acknowledged the gap themselves in the study, noting that performance and feasibility data for instruments and materials under Venus surface conditions remain limited. They are building a new high-pressure, high-temperature laboratory at the university to generate that data. That is honest. The difference between a concept and a mission is years of material testing, thermal modeling, and engineering that does not exist yet. But the physics says it is not impossible. And the record that stands at 127 minutes was once called impossible too.
† Add footnote: 'Source-reported; not independently verified.'
† Add footnote: 'Source-reported; not independently verified.'
