Worth noting that the Venera probes only survived between 23 minutes and 2 hours on the surface of Venus, due to the harsh conditions there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
There are data center engineers nowadays who would relish that challenge. 400C and 100bar? Pschaw, I have a cabinet in Fremont standing up to almost that.. ;-)
Pretty amazing their lunar 'robots' Lunokhud, survived for 11 months on the moon (well one did) - lots of interesting photos, but I've not been able to find any video they sent back.
They sent back video as they were remote controlling their robots, using video sent back at a decent resolution and lower frame rate, or low resolution and high frame rate. They needed this to ensure the robots did not get stuck, and because they couldn't build a robot that could automatically navigate for the length of time they hoped the mission would last (3 months).
It just seems amazing that this footage was sent back, but not recorded. I presume it was filmed (in much the same way that the US lunar video was captured on film, from video sent back to earth), but that it has not yet been released, or was lost or otherwise destroyed.
To me it feels like this would be very exciting footage to see - the first footage ever sent back from a robot on another celestial body. The video would also have been important for helping scientists understand the make up of the moon. Remember these missions were from when the Soviet Union had only been able to return 109g of lunar samples to earth. Not the 50kg the USA had from two manned missions.
