Akatsuki

Akatsuki

Context: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has confirmed that it lost contact with the spacecraft Akatsuki, humanity’s only mission to Venus. Akatsuki means “dawn” in Japanese.

About:

• Japan’s first successful mission to explore another planet was launched in 2010.
• Akatsuki is in an equatorial elongated orbit with a westward revolution that matches the Venusian atmosphere, which rotates westward.
• It complements the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express, which orbited Venus until 2014.

Objectives of mission

• Akatsuki is the Venus Climate Orbiter mission (PLANET-C), which is designed to observe Venus’s toxic atmosphere and super-hot volcanic surface in three dimensions.
• To study weather patterns on Venus, lightning in thick clouds, and search for signs of active volcanism.
• It is also supposed to study the super-rotation in Venus’s atmosphere, which is caused by strong winds estimated to be faster than 360 kph.
• Meteorological information is to be obtained by globally mapping clouds and minor constituents successively with four cameras at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths.
• These cameras detect lightning with a high-speed imager and observe the vertical structure of the atmosphere with radio science techniques.