Akatsuki Venus Climate Orbiter |
Akatsuki Venus Climate Orbiter |
Mar 13 2010, 11:29 AM
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#501
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1729 Joined: 3-August 06 From: 43° 35' 53" N 1° 26' 35" E Member No.: 1004 |
I thought it was time to start a separate thread on this mission, launching soon
some good medium-resolution images of the spacecraft are available on JAXA digital archives http://jda.jaxa.jp/jda/p3_e.php?time=N&...mp;mission=4066 |
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Dec 7 2015, 11:22 AM
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#502
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 88 Joined: 8-May 14 Member No.: 7185 |
we will probably know in two days whether the orbit insertion was succesful:
http://www.nature.com/news/japan-orbiter-s...=TWT_NatureNews "Update, 7 December (1:40 a.m. BST): Japan's Akatsuki mission has entered orbit around Venus. The spacecraft burned its engines as planned on 7 December and was captured by Venus's gravity, says team member Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Over the next two days, mission scientists will track the spacecraft and determine how closely the orbit matches what scientists had hoped for. That information is expected to be released at 6 p.m. Japan time (9 a.m. BST) on 9 December." |
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Dec 7 2015, 06:52 PM
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#503
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
A few notes summarizing the news as we know it:
The initial orbit for Akatsuki is certainly much more elongated than originally planned, but a future burn may make it less elongated. In any event, the elongated orbit will reduce the temporal coverage from original plans, but qualitatively, the data collected near periapsis should be as good as planned. Differences between Akatsuki and Venus Express include: 1) Akatsuki is planned to be in a more equatorial orbit as opposed to VEx's polar orbit. Even if things did not go precisely as planned, it is all but certain to be in an orbit with inclination that complements that of VEx. 2) VEx had a total failure of the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) instrument that was designed to make observations in IR. Akatsuki should be able to fill in some of what was lost, making IR observations relevant to atmospheric structure and composition, distribution of minor atmospheric components, and surface temperature. So, if we get any data at all out of Akatsuki, this is great news. |
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