The Soviet Venera 13 lander parachuted through the sulphuric acid clouds of Venus in March 1982 and touched down in a landscape hot enough to melt lead, transmitted the first colour photographs of the surface for 127 minutes before the pressure crushed it, and along the way recorded the wind — the only audio anyone has ever captured from another planet’s surface

On 1 March 1982, a Soviet lander named Venera 13 fell through the sulphuric acid clouds of Venus, deployed a parachute it would soon discard, and set down on a basalt plain at about 7.5 degrees south latitude in the eastern reaches of Phoebe Regio. NASA’s Perseverance rover has since recorded audio on Mars, and Huygens returned acoustic data during its descent through Titan’s atmosphere in 2005, but no mission has again put a working microphone on the surface of Venus. Everything planetary scientists know about the chemistry of the Venusian surface rests on X-ray fluorescence readings from three sites — Venera 13, Venera 14, and Vega 2 — each taken in the last minutes of a dying spacecraft.