The surface of Venus has been mostly off-limits to human exploration. Temperatures reach 460 degrees Celsius, and the sulfur dioxide is so thick it creates sulfuric acid clouds miles around on the next planet closest to the sun. Landers have only been able to function for mere hours, despite heavy devices hauled all the way from Earth to cool and pressurize the equipment.

But a new branch of silicon carbide tools which can extend exploration up to weeks – and perhaps even longer, according to a new NASA breakthrough.

“With further technology development, such electronics could drastically improve Venus lander designs and mission concepts, enabling the first long-duration missions to the surface of Venus,” said Phil Neudeck, lead engineer on the project at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

The two silicon carbide junction field effect transistor ring oscillator ICs (SiC JFET ICs) were tested with exposure to a similar Venusian environment, the team reports in the journal AIP Advances.

The tests lasted 21 days – a 100-fold improvement over the record.

That record for withstanding the planet’s inhospitable atmosphere is a mere 2 hours and seven minutes, set by the Russian lander Venera 13 on March 1, 1982.

The NASA team is still planning on making improvements, they write in the study unveiling the technology.

“We are presently striving to upscale the Venus-durable SiC JFET IC technology towards hundreds of transistors per chip circuit complexity,” they conclude. “Such level of integration would be comparable to the complexity of IC chips used in mankind’s first wave of solar system exploration launched prior to 1978, including the highly successful NASA Viking Mars landers.”

The Soviet Union sent more missions toward the second planet during the peak of its space program in the 1970s. However, Russia and the U.S. are currently considering whether to collaborate for a joint mission in the coming decade.