Japanese craft to get second chance after missing Venus in 2010

Five years after a balky valve kept it from entering orbit around Venus, Japan’s Akatsuki space probe is again approaching the sweltering planet for another shot at completing its science mission in December, officials said Friday.

The robotic spacecraft has spiraled around the inner solar system since it missed Venus in December 2010, as engineers on the ground meticulously planned for another chance to loop into orbit around Earth’s sister planet this year.

Akatsuki is on track for a critical maneuver Dec. 7 to position the spacecraft for capture by planet’s gravity, allowing the probe to enter an egg-shaped orbit stretching several hundred thousand miles from Venus at its farthest point — up to five times the planet’s diameter.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency released the $300 million mission’s new flight plan Friday.

The orbit now planned for Akatsuki is much higher than the orbit originally selected for the mission. Instead of taking about 30 hours to complete a lap around Venus — as was planned after the botched 2010 arrival — Akatsuki will complete one orbit every eight or nine days.

Akatsuki, which means dawn in Japanese, will use its less powerful attitude control thrusters for the orbit insertion maneuver in December. Its main engine is offline after it overheated and switched off early during the mission’s December 2010 encounter with Venus.
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Oh, excellent.

I can’t remember if I listed Akatsuki among my list of currently-operating spacecraft or if I listed it among my recently-shut-down spacecraft.

Two weeks til rendezvous

Two days til rendezvous though we probably won’t know until Thursday whether or not the orbit is appropriate

Win

http://www.space.com/31324-venus-arrival-by-japan-akatsuki-spacecraft.html

On Sunday (Dec. 6), Akatsuki fired its small attittude-control thrusters for 20 minutes to achieve Venus orbit (its main engine was pronounced dead long ago). After a few days of calculations and computations, mission controllers have now determined that the maneuver worked.

“The orbit period is 13 days and 14 hours. We also found that the orbiter is flying in the same direction as that of Venus’s rotation,” JAXA officials wrote in a statement today. “The Akatsuki is in good health.”

Akatsuki’s current path takes it as close as 250 miles (400 kilometers) to Venus, and as far away as 273,000 miles (440,000 km), officials added. This orbit is much more elliptical than the one Akatsuki was supposed to achieve five years ago, which featured a period of 30 hours and an apoapsis (most distant point from Venus) of 50,000 miles (80,000 km) or so.

dv said:

This orbit is much more elliptical than the one Akatsuki was supposed to achieve five years ago,

Better late then never, but the soup has gone cold.

sibeen said:

dv said:

This orbit is much more elliptical than the one Akatsuki was supposed to achieve five years ago,

Better late then never, but the soup has gone cold.

Japan has had some nice successes (first solar sail powered mission, first successful sample return from an asteroid) but this is their first successful mission to another planet per se.

The night side of Venus shows patterns of heat where lighter shades mean higher temperatures.

The clouds are thicker in some places and that affects the amount of radiation streaming into space. It’s like Venus is a light bulb and clouds a layer of paint on it.

dv said:

The night side of Venus shows patterns of heat where lighter shades mean higher temperatures.

The clouds are thicker in some places and that affects the amount of radiation streaming into space. It’s like Venus is a light bulb and clouds a layer of paint on it.

Lightbulb Sun