Every picture from Venus' surface, ever (2021)

Anything you send to Venus instantly fails; it would be tremendously expensive to try to collect more.

Balloon, long tether, hardened probe makes short trips to the surface. It could last for years.

The rough numbers I can find are that the acid cloud layer is ~75km thick, which seems awfully long for any kind of tether that'll have to support its own weight. With the low pressure (~0.1 ATM) it'd also need to be a rather big balloon.

Further down, the ~100m/s (~220 mph) winds on the tether would likely try to drag everything sideways, scraping any probe across the landscape.

Acid's a solved problem; PTFE (Teflon) is a comprehensive solution to hot sulfuric acid, well validated in chemical engineering problems on Earth. It's versatile enough you can even coat balloons with it [0].

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...

I definitely would like to see that. The advantage with Venus is also that the turnaround times would be shorter compared to Jupiter or Saturn.