Asset Publisher

Venus Express Status Report - May 2007

Venus Express Status Report - May 2007

Mission StatusThe Venus Express spacecraft has been operating nominally, with only relatively minor exceptions. One of these was a problem related to an anomaly where a thruster failed to close; the conclusion was that this anomaly was most likely due to a missed pulse in the commanding circuitry. The situation is being carefully monitored and has not happened again to date.

Operations and Archiving

Payload operations continue to run well, and minor improvements in the mission planning and constraint checking software continue to be made. A large amount of effort was invested in planning the next 'quadrature' period - a period where an Earth pointed attitude (e.g. for downlink) could violate an illumination constraint for the VMC. Planning around this, although technically not too complicated, requires careful preparation.

A successful science team meeting, combined with a Venus science workshop, was held at La Thuile 19-23 March 2007. One of the topics discussed was a potential future orbit change to allow for new types of observations.

Some delays have been encountered in the data deliveries for ingestion to the archive, but a first release of (a subset of) Venus Express data in the Planetary Science Archive (PSA) is still expected for this summer.

Science Highlights

A very good session on Venus Express results was held on 17 April 2007 at the EGU meeting in Vienna.

The preparations for a special section on Venus Express results (some 9 papers), to be published in Nature, are ongoing.

Last Update: 1 September 2019
28-Mar-2024 18:29 UT

ShortUrl Portlet

Shortcut URL

https://sci.esa.int/s/A1GolLW

Images And Videos

Related Publications

Related Links

Documentation