Akatsuki

Venus Climate Orbiter (VCO), Planet-C

Mission Profile

Akatsuki (Venus Climate Orbiter, Planet-C) is JAXA's dedicated Venus atmospheric science mission, launched on 21 May 2010 aboard an H-IIA rocket. A 2010 orbit insertion failure left the spacecraft drifting in a heliocentric orbit, but mission controllers executed a remarkable recovery burn in December 2015 using attitude control thrusters to successfully capture into Venusian orbit five years late. Akatsuki studies the global atmospheric circulation, cloud dynamics, lightning activity, and surface thermal emission of Venus using six cameras spanning ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths. Its long-baseline observations have revealed atmospheric super-rotation patterns and gravity wave phenomena in Venus's thick sulfuric acid cloud layers, providing data impossible to obtain from Earth.