What does VENERA stand for? 

Venera

The Venera series probes were developed by the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1984 to gather data from Venus, Venera being the Russian name for Venus. As with some of the Soviet Union's other planetary probes, the later versions were launched in pairs with a second vehicle being launched soon after the first of the pair. Ten probes from the Venera series successfully landed on Venus and transmitted data from the surface, including the two Vega program and Venera-Halley probes. In addition, thirteen Venera probes successfully transmitted data from the atmosphere of Venus. Among the other results, probes of the series became the first man-made devices to enter the atmosphere of another planet, to make a soft landing on another planet, to return images from the planetary surface, and to perform high-resolution radar mapping studies of Venus. The entire series could be considered highly successful. Unfortunately the surface conditions on Venus are extreme, therefore the probes only survived on the surface for a duration of 23 minutes up to about two hours.

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