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Europe's Venus Express enters orbit

Posted on: Tuesday, 11 April 2006, 07:50 CDT

By Bernhard Winkler

DARMSTADT, Germany (Reuters) - Europe's first space probe to Venus slipped smoothly into the planet's orbit on Tuesday and sent its first signals from there to Earth, ground controllers said.

The 1.3 ton Venus Express took off on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan last November, traveling 250 million miles through space to a mission scheduled to last 486 days.

"Everything went as it was planned, clearly, without difficulties," Gaele Winters, European Space Agency (ESA) director of operations, told a news conference. "This is a great success," he said.

Priced at a relatively modest 220 million euros ($265 million) and built by firms from 14 countries, the Venus Express underlines the ambition of European scientists to be at the cutting edge of exploring the scope and origins of the universe.

"It all comes back to the basic question that I'm sure just about everybody has asked --- how did we turn up here out of all that?" said David Southwood, director of science at ESA.

Venus Express will take another four weeks to reach its operational orbit before sending back data from a hellish atmosphere made up mainly of carbon monoxide and clouds of sulphuric acid where temperatures average 842 degrees Fahrenheit.

But in other respects, including size, mass and composition, Venus closely resembles Earth and scientists will use the data to look for answers as to why so near a counterpart has evolved so differently over the last 4,600 million years.

ENIGMA

Shrouded by a layer of clouds 12 miles thick and buffeted by extremes of temperature and pressure, Venus is Earth's nearest planetary neighbor but is an enigma to science.

Its dense atmosphere creates a supercharged greenhouse effect, spinning round the planet in four days in a "super rotation" phenomenon that scientists cannot explain.

Some researchers have said there may once have been life on Venus. They hope to obtain clues about greenhouse conditions on Venus and whether any comparisons about global warming on Earth can be drawn.

Beyond that, the scientists are hoping that Venus Express, a virtual twin of the Mars Express craft which has been providing spectacular images of the Red Planet since 2003, will be the stepping stone to further European space missions.

"We (Europe) aren't finished with the planets," said Southwood. "We're planning to go back to Mars and we're planning also to go to Mercury, one of the most mysterious of planets very close to the Sun," he said.

Officials at the ESA's Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, said the Venus probe had completed a braking operation to gain position to be dragged into the planet's orbit.

After a brief period when the craft passed behind the planet and out of contact with Earth, transmissions were received at 0912 GMT (5:12 a.m. EST), according to the Agency's Web site www.esa.int.

It will orbit the planet's poles well above the cloud cover from a distance of 250 to 66,000 km, collecting data with instruments designed to build on observations from previous missions to the planet.

One Venus day is the equivalent of 243 Earth days, due to its slower rotation.

Atmospheric pressure is 90 times greater than on Earth and no space probe that has gone into the planet's atmosphere has survived for long, with a Russian device setting the record of 110 minutes before melting in the heat.

Source: REUTERS

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