Venus mission ready for blast off

[Rick]

Venus Express anomaly

On 28 November 2014, the flight control team at ESOC reported loss of contact with Venus Express.

It is possible that the remaining fuel on board VEX was exhausted during the recent periapsis-raising manoeuvres (see blog post here) and that the spacecraft is no longer in a stable attitude (the spacecraft's high-gain antenna must be kept pointed toward Earth to ensure reliable radio contact).

Repeated attempts to re-establish contact using ESA and NASA deep-space tracking stations have been made since then, and there has been some limited success in the period since 3 December.

More: http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2014/12/05/venus-express-anomaly/

[Rick]

Venus Express goes gently into the night

ESA's Venus Express has ended its eight-year mission after far exceeding its planned life. The spacecraft exhausted its propellant during a series of thruster burns to raise its orbit following the low-altitude aerobraking earlier this year.

Since its arrival at Venus in 2006, Venus Express had been on an elliptical 24‑hour orbit, traveling 66 000 km above the south pole at its furthest point and to within 200 km over the north pole on its closest approach, conducting a detailed study of the planet and its atmosphere.

However, after eight years in orbit and with propellant for its propulsion system running low, Venus Express was tasked in mid-2014 with a daring aerobraking campaign, during which it dipped progressively lower into the atmosphere on its closest approaches to the planet.

Normally, the spacecraft would perform routine thruster burns to ensure that it did not come too close to Venus and risk being lost in the atmosphere. But this unique adventure was aimed at achieving the opposite, namely reducing the altitude and allowing an exploration of previously uncharted regions of the atmosphere.

More from ESA

[Rick]

Update on VEX carrier monitoring

As we described last Friday, the operations team at ESOC are able to continue monitoring radio signals from Venus Express; they can 'see' the X-band carrier wave being transmitted from the spacecraft's high-gain antenna despite the fact that it is not pointed at Earth, although this, too, is steadily dropping off.

More: http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2015/01/15/update-on-vex-carrier-monitoring/

[Rick]

Hot Lava Flows Discovered on Venus

ESA's Venus Express has found the best evidence yet for active volcanism on Earth's neighbour planet.

Seeing the planet's surface is extremely difficult due to its thick atmosphere, but radar observations by previous missions to Venus have revealed it as a world covered in volcanoes and ancient lava flows.

Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth and has a similar bulk composition, so is likely to have an internal heat source, perhaps due to radioactive heating. This heat has to escape somehow, and one possibility is that it does so in the form of volcanic eruptions.

Some models of planetary evolution suggest that Venus was resurfaced in a cataclysmic flood of lava around half a billion years ago. But whether Venus is active today has remained a hot topic in planetary science.

ESA's Venus Express, which completed its eight-year study of the planet last year, conducted a range of observations at different wavelengths to address this important question.

More from ESA