Every picture from Venus' surface, ever (2021)
planetary.org
planetary.org
http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm - here are few more; site may load really slowly.
https://youtu.be/UEmlOjKmL68 - Asianometry video covering topic of Soviet Venera program
The Soviets had already landed a probe on Mars, which sent back the top few lines of a picture of the sky and then stopped scanning down, and died. So they must have not wanted a repeat of that disappointment!
Probably, on Venus, the bandwidth and sensor tech just weren’t enough for it to be possible to get more pixels in the time available? So they concentrated the effort on the nearest rocks
Sadly that does make the photos visually sort of unimpressive, unlike all the splendid panoramic views America’s Viking probes took of Mars. (Where the lander wasn’t being pressure cooked and acid-etched in 20 minutes)
Further down, the ~100m/s (~220 mph) winds on the tether would likely try to drag everything sideways, scraping any probe across the landscape.
The hard part is keeping electronics cool. The balloon ideas offer a really elegant solution. You could cycle a balloon between altitudes—between the 500 °C surface, and cold layers of the high atmosphere, cooling off and refilling a thermal storage reservoir for the surface. On Venus, can find cool 20 °C air at a very reasonable, balloon-navigable, 0.5 bar pressure level [1].
[0] https://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/news/up-up-and-away-to-venus/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus?#/media/Fi...