Japan\u2019s Aerospace Exploration Agency has decided to abandon its Akatsuki Venus orbiter, after losing contact with the craft last year.<\/p>\n
JAXA launched Akatsuki, a name that translates to \u201cDawn\u201d in English, aboard one of its own H-IIA rockets in May 2010. The agency\u2019s plan was for the craft to enter Venus orbit in December of the same year, but the planned twelve-minute burn designed to achieve that outcome sputtered out after three minutes due to a failure of its main engine that left Akatsuki orbiting the Sun.<\/p>\n
Astroboffins tried using Akatsuki\u2019s remaining thrusters and engines to adjust its orbit so it could reach Venus, and after five years of work that effort succeeded when the craft nestled into orbit around Earth\u2019s nearest planetary neighbor December 2015<\/a>. It started sending snaps a couple of days later<\/a>.<\/p>\n That outcome was a win, given JAXA designed Akatsuki to operate for four-and-a-half years. But in 2016 some of the orbiter\u2019s cameras became difficult for JAXA to control due to electrical problems. The aerospace agency later shut down<\/a> two of its five snappers to protect the orbiter.<\/p>\n Akatsuki was nonetheless able to capture lots of useful data that scientists used to produce hundreds<\/a> of scholarly works.<\/p>\n In April 2024, Akatsuki glitched again \u2013 bigtime \u2013 when efforts to stabilize its orbit failed and JAXA lost contact with the spacecraft.<\/p>\n The agency has tried to contact Akatsuki ever since, but on Thursday ended<\/a> the probe\u2019s operations<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough recovery operations were conducted to restore communication, there has been no luck so far,\u201d states JAXA\u2019s announcement. \u201cConsidering the fact that the spacecraft has aged, well exceeding its designed lifetime, and was already in the late-stage operation phase, it has been decided to terminate operations.\u201d<\/p>\n The end of the Akatsuki mission means humanity currently has no active spacecraft at Venus, but planners hope to launch four missions to the planet in coming years.<\/p>\n NASA hopes to launch its DAVINCI+<\/a> lander in 2030, and an orbiter named VERITAS<\/a> no earlier than 2031. The European Space Agency last year approved<\/a> a mission called \u201cEnvision\u201d it hopes to launch in 2031.<\/p>\n A group from Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised a mission to Venus that private launch outfit Rocket Lab hoped<\/a> to launch in January 2025 but now plans<\/a> to launch no later than northern summer 2026. The mission will look for signs of life. The spacecraft will need to act fast to find them, as the mission\u2019s designers expect it to operate for just five minutes once dropped into the hot and dense Venusian atmosphere. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Japan\u2019s Aerospace Exploration Agency has decided to abandon its Akatsuki Venus orbiter, after losing contact with the craft…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[49,48,66,306],"class_list":["post-154850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}