After more than a year on ice due to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, NASA and Russia’s Space Research Institute has resumed discussions about a joint exploration mission to Venus, which could include a lander. NASA hasn’t flown a mission dedicated to Venus since its Magellan probe, from 1990 to 1994, which mapped 98 percent of the planet at a resolution of 100 meters or better.

So far NASA has only committed to talking with Russia about its Venera-D mission, which could launch in the 2020s. The space agency has agreed to perform a year-long feasibility study and several meetings during the next year. After that time NASA and Russia’s Space Research Institute, or IKI, will decide whether to continue its partnership, according to a report in Spaceflight Now.

“We made a lot of progress,” said David Senske, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is the US co-chair of the Venera-D science definition team. “We heard a lot about what they had in mind. We’ve been told this is an IKI/Roscosmos endeavor, so they’re in the driver’s seat.”

For Russia a new planetary mission has great significance. Russia and its forerunner space agencies in the USSR have not had a successful planetary exploration mission since 1985 when its Vega 1 and Vega 2 probes flew by Venus and sampled its atmosphere en route to Halley’s Comet. After failures in the early 1990s, Russia’s space agency conducted no planetary missions at all in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following the dissolution of the USSR. Its first mission after, to the Martian moon of Phobos in 2011, was lost shortly after launching.

Venus is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, and certainly Russia has had a long affinity for the planet closest to Earth. Whereas NASA has focused more of its robotic exploration efforts on Mars, Russia has similarly focused on Venus. But not always with success.

Between 1961 and 1964 the USSR attempted to launch no fewer than nine probes to Venus, from Sputnik 7 to Zond 1, and all failed. Most of the failures came due to rocket issues. Then, in 1966, the Venera 2 spacecraft flew to within 24,000 km of the planet, but communications were lost with the spacecraft as it neared Venus. Later in 1966 the Venera 3 spacecraft attempted to land on Venus, but it was crushed by Venus’ very thick atmosphere, with a pressure 92 times that of Earth.

Finally, from 1970 to 1975, in what may be considered the crowning glory of Russia’s planetary exploration history, the Venera 7, 8, 9, and 10 probes all landed successfully on Venus. The Venera 7 mission marked the first successful landing on another planet. Venera 9 returned the first photos of the stark Venusian surface. All of the probes survived less than an hour with the hellish surface pressures and average surface temperature above 460 degrees Celsius.

With the Venera-D mission, first designed in 2004, Russia hoped to land a more durable spacecraft on the surface of Venus. The “D” in the mission stands for Dolgozhivushaya, which means long-lasting. Initially the Russians hoped to design a lander that could survive as long as 30 days in the harsh environment. However the loss of the Phobos mission forced further delays in Russian planetary exploration and a downsizing of those ambitions.

Now, by partnering with NASA, Russia hopes to share the costs. In turn, NASA has a number of research goals it would like to accomplish with a modern orbiter and possibly a short-lived lander. The agency's Venus analysis group has set as its principal scientific goal the discovery of how Venus diverged so dramatically from Earth and, as part of this, wants to better understand the formation, evolution, and climate history on Venus.

Additionally, unlike Russia, NASA has never landed on Venus.