should point out that venus is above the curie point of a lot of magnetics. for example forget about neodymium. electromagnets should still work.

Yeah, but I think you’ve missed the point. You need the election emitting material, but you might not need to heat it given the high ambient temperatures. A larger problem might be other parts of the assembly emitting thermal elections you don’t want.

Combining a ‘dumb’ rover with high temperature electronics (solid state or vacuum tube) to a flying kite like station in the atmosphere that has the clever bits might give a way forward without requiring sophisticated processing at high temperatures.

Mechanics controlled by solenoids can get you a long way without requiring sophisticated electronics on the surface.

yeah, boiling off something cold was what struck me too. bring a cold sink, and operate until it’s saturated.

NASA only attempted landing on Venus once, with Pioneer Venus 2, which carried several landers. They all reached the surface intact. As with the Venera landers, they didn’t last long on the surface.

ISTR The USSR focused on Venus because travel time to Venus was shorter than to Mars. They traced a bunch of Mars failures to electronics issues – the electronics simply didn’t survive long enough to reach the planet. Venus could be reached in less time, so the chance that the spacecraft still worked on arrival was higher.

The heating filaments provide, as you already mentioned/asked, the necessary electrons to function.

I think the original proposal for this project was to modulate a reflector on the robot, such that an orbiting satellite with a radar could provide the signal and read the response. You can’t send data to the robot, but you could get analog data back that way without needing any electronics on the robot.