Venus
At 52-55 km the pressure is 1 bar and the temperature 30-60 °C. The most Earth-like conditions off Earth are in Venusian cloud, not on any surface.
Surface conditions on Venus
Every figure below is tagged with where it came from. Measured means an instrument read it on or at the body; modeled means it was computed and never directly observed.
What it would take to settle Venus
No world off Earth is habitable — the honest habitable fraction of every surface here is zero. What can be answered is how far each one sits from Earth along the seven axes a habitat has to buy its way out of. Venus scores 43 out of 100, on 100% coverage of the axes. The single worst axis here is pressure (92.00 bar); the one that most sets Venus apart from the other thirteen is water.
Below the Armstrong limit (0.062 bar) body fluids boil at body temperature — the difference between needing a mask and needing a pressure vessel. Above 1 bar the problem inverts into containment, and Venus at 92 bar has never let a lander live two hours.
Water is drinking water, breathing oxygen and rocket propellant in one deposit. A world without it has to import all three forever.
Both directions cost power continuously. A cold world burns reactor output to stay warm; a hot one has no cold sink to dump heat into at all.
Delta-v sets what a launch costs; cruise time sets how much consumable, shielding and crew patience each kilogram of payload drags with it.
Who has been to Venus
Ten Soviet landers survived to transmit. The record is Venera 13, at 127 minutes before it was crushed and cooked.
Unprotected survival: Under a second. You are crushed, then cooked, then dissolved.
No water anywhere. Venus lost its ocean; the deuterium/hydrogen ratio says most of it boiled off.
The named places on Venus
The IAU has approved 1,985 names on Venus, each drawn from a theme the naming committee chose for this world. Every name in the scene above is one of them, placed at its catalogued coordinates.
Sources
- Magellan SAR — Magellan SAR, left look, 75 m/px (NASA Trek / USGS Astrogeology)
- IAU / USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature
- NASA Venus fact sheet
- USGS — Magellan global mosaics
Imagery is public-domain NASA/USGS mission data, streamed live from NASA Trek as a plate-carrée tile pyramid and draped on our own sphere — no third-party globe library and no cached copy of anyone else's map.