Er, it may be an American thing, but Venera-D sounds like an abbreviated form of an old term for STD's.  ElkGroveDan was polite to not put it so bluntly.

No word on the thermal strategy: Build a spacecraft that can withstand the heat. Or, use refrigeration to keep the probe cool. Or some combination of both

I'm thinking that some form of evaporative cooling might be the only feasible process.

Surely an evaporative system would contaminate the local environment, rather negating the point of operating on the surface for a month.

If the name Venera (which is Russian for Venus) is going to cause so much hilarity, heaven help us if NASA anounce they are going to send a probe to Uranus.

I have already seen this, at the ESA site i believe. I'm serious.  I promise.

I've seen it there, too. It was quite a while ago.

When I had to teach a fifth grade classroom about Uranus I let them all have a good laugh at me (and them) pronouncing it "Your Anus" and "Urine Us" and then I wrote the following on the board: "You're a Nuss!" and had them all turn to each other and accuse each other of being Nusses.  After a brief bit of speculation on what a Nuss could possibly be we moved on and the fifth graders were able to handle talking about Uranus.  Unfortunately my husband still can't handle it.  Every time I tell him about a new mission to some place he asks "But when are they going to send a mission to Uranus?" and then cracks up.  Sigh.  I get no respect. Anyway, in the spirit of "any publicity is good publicity" I expect that if a mission ever gets on the books for Uranus its unfortunate name can only help; it will be the best-known space mission among people who listen to shock jocks, watch Jon Stewart for their primary source of news, etc.  Howard Stern won't be able to stop talking about it.

--Emily

No word on the thermal strategy: Build a spacecraft that can withstand the heat. Or, use refrigeration to keep the probe cool. Or some combination of both. A probe that was built to withstand the heat might well last indefinitely, much longer than a month.

Would this be the first Soviet/Russian spacecraft to use an RTG? I think they have been able to rely upon batteries and solar panels thus far.

The next question is what a long-lived probe's long life would be for. Data on wind/temperature/pressure variations would be interesting, but may turn out to be boringly constant. It's possible that wind would blow some dust around, but that's no guarantee. Skyward looking cameras could show variation in cloud structure blowing overhead. One baseline instrument that seems to me to provide a clear need for life beyond an hour would be a seismograph, which is of diminished value without a long life span. Additionally, if there is a sampling/instrument arm, then arbitrarily long mission durations could yield the benefit of more sampling, especially with irradiative spectrometers that require long integration times. Maybe a long, double-jointed arm could scan a grid around the lander, moving a small suite of MER-like instruments carefully around the base. It would then be essential to keep the arm's movements from interfering with the seismometer.