Venus is the second planet of the solar system.
This planet does have an atmosphere, but it is much denser then the atmosphere of earth. 
The pressure of the atmosphere at the surface is 90 atmospheres. It is composed mostly of carbon dioxide. There are several layers of clouds many kilometers thick composed of sulfuric acid. Because of the dense atmosphere, the planet suffers from heavy global warming. The temperature can rise to 500 degrees Celsius (932 degrees Fahrenheit) during the day. Venus' surface is actually hotter than Mercury's despite being nearly twice as far from the Sun.

Venus can be seen pretty good from the earth. That's because of the dense atmosphere which reflects the sunbeams. 

The First spacecraft that visited the planet was mariner 2 (1962). After that the planet has been visited by more then 20 other spacecraft. The first spacecraft to return photographs of the surface was Venera 9. Most recently the spacecraft magellan, which is orbiting the planet, has made detailed surface maps of the planet.

Data from Magellan's imaging radar shows that much of the surface of Venus is covered by lava flows. There are several large shield volcanoes (similar to Hawaii or Olympus Mons).  Recently announced findings indicate that Venus is still volcanically active, but only in a few hot spots; for the most part it has been geologically rather quiet for the past few hundred million years. The oldest terrains on Venus seem to be about 800 million years old. Extensive volcanism at that time wiped out the earlier surface including any large craters from early in Venus' history.

There are no small craters on Venus. It seems that small meteoroids burn up in Venus' dense atmosphere before reaching the surface. Craters on Venus seem to come in bunches indicating that large meteoriods that do reach the surface usually break up in the atmosphere.

Venus has about the same size as earth (Venus has a diameter of 12,104 km (7,522 miles), Earth has a diameter of 12,756 km (7,928 miles)) . And the core of the planet consists of iron, nickel and other metals. The air on Venus contains mostly carbon dioxide, which means that if Venus had plants, they would turn the carbon-dioxide into oxygen which would make life on this planet possible.

A rotation around the sun takes Venus 225 days to complete.
The distance to the sun is 108.2 million km (67.25 million miles) And a rotation around her own axis takes 243 days. 
The planets mass is 4.869e24 kg
Venus has no satellites.

Pictures of Venus (click to see the large picture):