A pair of Soviet space probes launched towards Venus in December 1984 that later visited Halley's Comet.
On passing Venus in June 1985, both spacecraft released landing modules. During the descent, each lander released a 3.4-m sounding balloon that floated at a height of 54 km in the atmosphere of Venus, travelling 11 000 km in two days. Precise tracking of the two balloons by radio telescopes on Earth (using very long-baseline interferometry to obtain high-resolution images) allowed astronomers to study the atmospheric circulation of Venus. In March 1986, the two Vega probes passed within 9 000 km of the nucleus of Halley's Comet. Vega 1 and Vega 2 are currently in heliocentric orbits.