Venus Express preliminary investigations bring encouraging newsOctober 26, 2005Following the announcement of the Venus Express launch delay due to particulate contamination found in the launcher fairing where the spacecraft was installed, ESA staff and industry teams have started an inspection of the spacecraft. This recovery 'investigation procedure' has so far revealed a spacecraft in good status. Having been removed from the Soyuz rocket, the upper composite, consisting of the Venus Express spacecraft attached to the Fregat upper stage and all housed in the rocket fairing, was transported to the Baikonur cosmodrome's Upper Composite Integration Facility in the early morning of Sunday 23 October. On Monday 24 October the fairing was removed and engineers started the inspection to assess the status of the spacecraft. The scenario is so far very encouraging, as only fairly large particles, pieces of the insulating material initially covering the launcher's Fregat upper stage, have been found on the body of the spacecraft. These have been easy to identify by naked eye or with UV lamps, and are being carefully removed with tweezers, vacuum-cleaners or nitrogen gas airbrushes, according to size. In the next couple of days the inspections and cleaning of Venus Express will continue, focussing on the instrument optics and apertures. After this step, Venus Express will be ready for the electric tests, routine checks that precede the final cleaning done just before the encapsulation with the fairing. The upper composite will then be complete again and will be ready for re-integration with the launcher. ESA and Starsem, the company responsible for the Soyuz-Fregat launcher, are merging the results of their parallel investigations and recovery measures to define a new launch date in the shortest time frame. The ESA Project team is confident that Venus Express will be launched well within the launch window, which closes on 24 November this year. European Space Agency |
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| Related Venus Express Current Events and Venus Express News Articles New map hints at Venus's wet, volcanic past Venus Express has charted the first map of Venus's southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths. The new map hints that our neighbouring world may once have been more Earth-like, with both, a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water. Where did Venus's water go? Venus Express has made the first detection of an atmospheric loss process on Venus's day-side. Last year, the spacecraft revealed that most of the lost atmosphere escapes from the night-side. Venus comes to life at wavelengths invisible to human eyes A pale yellow-green dot to the human eye, Earth's twin planet comes to life in the ultraviolet and the infrared. New images taken by instruments on board ESA's Venus Express provide insight into the turbulent atmosphere of our neighbouring planet. Key molecule discovered in Venus's atmosphere Venus Express has detected the molecule hydroxyl on another planet for the first time. This detection gives scientists an important new tool to unlock the workings of Venus's dense atmosphere. Plan to identify watery Earth-like planets develops Astronomers are looking to identify Earth-like watery worlds circling distant stars from a glint of light seen through an optical space telescope and a mathematical method developed by researchers at Penn State and the University of Hawaii. Venus Express reboots the search for active volcanoes on Venus ESA's Venus Express has measured a highly variable quantity of the volcanic gas sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus. Scientists must now decide whether this is evidence for active volcanoes on Venus, or linked to a hitherto unknown mechanism affecting the upper atmosphere. Mars and Venus are surprisingly similar Using two ESA spacecraft, planetary scientists are watching the atmospheres of Mars and Venus being stripped away into space. The simultaneous observations by Mars Express and Venus Express give scientists the data they need to investigate the evolution of the two planets' atmospheres. The light and dark of Venus Venus Express has revealed a planet of extraordinarily changeable and extremely large-scale weather. Bright hazes appear in a matter of days, reaching from the south pole to the low southern latitudes and disappearing just as quickly. Basque Country University researchers publish two articles in Nature on latest discoveries on Venus Nature journal has published a series of articles devoted to the new discoveries by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Venus Express space probe made on our neighbouring planet. Setting stars reveal planetary secrets Watching the stars set from the surface of the Earth may be a romantic pastime but when a spacecraft does it from orbit, it can reveal hidden details about a planet's atmosphere. More Venus Express Current Events and Venus Express News Articles |
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