The Russians landed on Venus. And got photographs back. There isn't a much harder landing than that.
Imagine sending a probe to another planet, land successfully, and survive the hostile environment (for a little while anyway), only to have the issues with the lens cap. Again, and again, and again, and again.
A more recent failure has been on Curiosity. While it's been hailed a great success, it's had some major issues fulfilling with what was one if it's primary objectives - drilling into surface level targets and starting to measure things from the inside. It became inoperable after a few superficial utilizations. The most likely culprit? A piece of debris got caught in a drill feed mechanism. It could've been fixed by a man on the ground in a matter of minutes, but there is no man on the ground of course. NASA did manage to get a 2 inch drill without the stabilizers in the mid part of last year [1], thought there have been no updates since.
In many ways this is why I think people tend to rather overestimate the value of probes and remote robotics in general. Robotics, even to do relatively simple things, is incredibly hard. Trying to do not so simple things on planets tens to hundreds of millions of miles away in conditions unlike anything you can perfectly replicate on Earth? Well, you better send a few copies and just hope that what goes wrong on one probe/lander/etc (because something will go wrong) works out on one of the others!
[1] - https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/06/05/scientists-resume-use-...
The Soviets did an admirable job in even succeeded sending one of those photos back.
But to be fair to the Russians, the cameras weren't an important part of the mission (except for showing off), and getting rid of the caps at 700K temperature, 92bar pressure and sulfuric acid rain, while still preserving the cameras in working condition, is probably very difficult.
A chronology of that audio is:
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00:33 - Landing
00:41 - Camera lens cap being ejected off
01:00 - 02:09 - Drilling
02:14 - The drill system had a special series of tubes that used Venus' surface pressure to operate the mechanism for retrieving the soil sample, this is the seals being popped off to allow the pressure to rush in.
02:42 - Soil being injected into chamber
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Just unbelievable to understand that you're listening to the sounds of Venus from the surface of Venus. For anybody who'd like to know the location that's at 13.25°S 310°E on a basaltic plain near Phoebe Regio. That lander lasted for 57 minutes in temperatures of 869F with a pressure of 94 Earth atmospheres. The most remarkable thing to consider is that this all happened in 1981. Now 38 years ago. It's such a shame that the space race ended. There's no reason at all to think we wouldn't have been on Mars many years ago had it persisted.
I think the new head of NASA is much more ambitious and seems genuinely enthusiastically interested in making space exploration work. There was a nice writeup on 'We're not going to [just] do flags and footprints again.' here [1]. The great thing is that even outside of NASA, the future of space looks brighter than ever before at least. In a way we're in our own 1962, which was when JFK gave his 'We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.' to the moon speech.
[1] - https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/nasa/nasa-a...
Very cool. However, I kinda understand why most landers don't record audio: they seem very focused on achieving scientific objectives and those aren't really advanced by recording manmade sounds.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283775
Edit: Jump to the 16:50 mark here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsyzwn