On its journey to Halley’s Comet, Vega 1 launches a balloon into Venus’s atmosphere that transmits for 46 hours and a probe that transmits from the surface for 56 minutes. Vega 2 follows four days later, while the lander successfully lands north of Aphrodite Terra. Due to excessive turbulence, some surface experiments are inadvertently activated 20 km from the surface. Only the mass spectrometer is able to return data.
