European probe now in orbit around Venus
A European space probe successfully reached orbit around Venus today on a mission to explore the mysterious atmosphere of Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour.
Mission controllers at the European Space Agency control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, cheered, clapped and embraced after they picked up the signal from the Venus Express craft, indicating it had completed the orbital manoeuvre.
The probe disappeared behind the planet for roughly 10 minutes, leaving controllers without contact as it swung around the back of the planet, whose hot, dense atmosphere the mission plans to explore.
“It’s a fantastic mission for us. We’ve finally reached Venus,” said project manager Don McCoy.
Europe’s space programme now has craft orbiting two planets in the solar system other than Earth, with the Mars Express probe circling Mars. A third craft, Rosetta, is on its way to land on a comet.
“We’ve put together a second planetary mission in as short a time as possible,” said McCoy. “We’ve put two satellites around two planets. It’s incredible what we’ve accomplished.”
The Venus Express signal reappeared as a bright green line on a screen in mission control after the manoeuvre, in which Venus Express fired its main engine for 51 minutes, slowing it down so the planet’s gravity could pull it into orbit.
Officials say they could have a first picture of the Venutian south pole back from the spacecraft as early as Thursday.
ESA will use the craft’s seven instruments to search for clues about why Venus wound up with an atmosphere almost 90 times denser than Earth’s and shrouded in clouds of sulphuric acid.
Of key importance will be studying Venus’ strong greenhouse effect (the way carbon dioxide traps the sun’s heat) and the permanent hurricane-force winds that constantly circle it high in the planet’s atmosphere.
The instruments on board the £153m (€220m) craft include spectrometers to measure temperature and analyse the atmosphere and a special camera that will concentrate on documenting whether or not Venus’ many volcanoes are active.
Venus is the nearest planet to Earth within the solar system, and the two share similar mass and density. Both have inner cores of rock and are believed to have been formed at roughly the same time.
Yet despite those similarities, the two have vastly different atmospheres, with Venus’ composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide and very little water vapour. Thanks to runaway warming from its greenhouse effect, Venus has the hottest surface of all the planets, about 464 degrees Celsius.
Scientists hope the mission will provide answers. “Venus is quite close to earth, yet so radically different,” said project director McCoy. “Why is that?”
If everything goes according to plan, ESA plans to keep the probe active for 500 days, with the possibility of extending its life by another 500 days.
The aluminium-frame probe, coated with a metallic polymer skin to protect it from heat, is a sister craft to ESA’s Mars Express, which was launched in June 2003 and reached Martian orbit in December of that year.
Venus Express was launched on November 9 on a Russian booster rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The last mission to Venus was Nasa’s Magellan probe, launched in 1989. It completed more than 15,000 orbits around the planet between 1990 and 1994. Using radar, Magellan was able to map almost all of Venus, revealing towering volcanoes, gigantic rifts and sharp-edged craters.
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