Daring plan pays off at Venus for Japan's Akatsuki mission

This artist's conception drawing shows JAXA's Venus Climate Orbiter, aka Akatsuki, in orbit around Earth's cloud-shrouded sister planet. Credit: Akihiro Ikeshita/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)

Wednesday, December 9, 2015, 3:07 PM - A rare combination of patience and daring pays off at Venus for Japan's Akatsuki spacecraft, NASA explores space weather way out at Pluto, and will SpaceX soon be landing rockets on the ground? It's What's Up In Space!

Akatsuki now circles Venus

On December 6, 2010, Japan's Venus Climate Orbiter spacecraft - nicknamed Akatsuki ("Dawn") - attempted to slip into orbit around Earth's sister planet. However, due to a mishap with the probe's engines, it missed and instead began to circle the Sun very close to Venus' orbit.

For the past five years, Akatsuki and its team here on Earth have been waiting for a second chance, and their patience has now paid off.

However, this wasn't just a case of simply trying the same maneuvers again. The spacecraft's main engine was irreparably damaged in the first attempt. So, over the course of the past five years, the team first ordered Akatsuki to lighten its load by dumping its remaining 65 kilograms of fuel oxidizer into space, and then use its smaller reaction control system (RCS) jets to perform a series of course corrections to put it in exactly the right position to pull off a daring maneuver once it reached Venus again.

Having arrived at Venus on December 7, 2015, Akatsuki fired its RCS jets again, this time sustaining that burn for a full 20 minutes. As these jets were not designed to perform this kind of maneuver, this was a very risky part of the plan. Any one of these jets could have overloaded or simply cut off during the burn, likely causing the probe to either plummet into the Venusian atmosphere or to tumble off into deep space.

As of today, December 9, 2015, JAXA - the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency - confirmed that not only had Akatsuki performed this maneuver successfully, but the probe was now in orbit around Venus as planned!

Orbital diagram for Akatsuki, with notes from the mission team. Credit: JAXA

Watch Below: See the details of the Akatsuki mission and the reasons for exploring Venus' atmosphere and climate.

A distant explorer gives us a long-view of space weather

Here on Earth, we get the chance to experience and study space weather on a fairly regular basis - sometimes in wonderful, vibrant ways and other times in ways that are somewhat worrisome.

The Sun blasts out solar flares that can result in radio blackouts, as well as coronal mass ejections that can not only produce amazing displays of the Aurora Borealis, but also pose a threat to our power grids.

Scientists with NASA and NOAA model these coronal mass ejections using a computer program named Enlil, after the Sumerian god of the wind. They have plenty of observations from Earth to help them calibrate this model, however a few from even farther away would help make the model even better.

It just so happened that when it flew through the Pluto system back in July 2015, New Horizons' instruments picked up the solar wind - the constant stream of particles from the Sun - and detected when different parts of the solar wind swept past it, and when it encountered denser regions from coronal mass ejections.

Data from the Sun, the near-Earth environment and from New Horizons was fed into Enlil to produce this animation of space weather activity from February through August of 2015.

The model shows the solar system from far above the Sun's north pole, looking down, so that we can see everything out to the orbit of Pluto.

According to NASA Goddard:

Three different variables are presented from the model - temperature, density, and pressure gradient, simultaneously, using the red, green and blue color channels of the color image. The density of the solar wind (green) flowing outward from the sun decreases as it spreads out. The temperature stays roughly constant as the solar wind material spreads through the solar system. We see the Parker spiral imprinted on the outflow from the spinning sun, much like the outflow from a spinning water sprinkler. We also see the strong density gradients (blue) created by coronal mass ejections and other shocks, propagating outward from the sun in the solar wind.

In addition to those three primary colours, the plasma in the model melds together to produce purples, blues, yellows and whites, as shown via the tri-colour diagram to the right. These combinations are more common closer to the Sun.

With this new version of the model, the "long view" provided by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is helping improve our ability to predict how these clouds of charged plasma expand out into the solar system, and especially how they will affect Earth.

Will SpaceX dump the barge for something even cooler?

SpaceX has been on a quest for the reusable rocket booster, with several attempts so far to land the first stage of their Falcon 9 on an automated drone barge at sea.

So far, although they've come closer with each attempt, success still eludes them. These barge landings are simply a step along their path, however, with the ultimate goal being a touchdown on solid land, as shown in the video below.

There's no official confirmation of this yet, but there are rumours floating about recently that the company may leave the barge tied to the dock for the next launch, and instead aim for the part of Cape Canaveral they leased earlier this year for a landing pad.

If true, this could be in response to Jeff Bezos' recent Blue Origin sub-orbital landing, although the Falcon 9 landings are much more difficult - from farther up and slowing from much faster speeds. It could also be the company simply taking the next logical step in the process, as the motions of the barge - even with its station-keeping ability - add one extra variable that could turn a successful landing into another explosion.

Sources: JAXA | JAXA VCO | NASA | Bad Astronomy

Related video: A close-up look at one of SpaceX's first attempts at a barge landing at sea ends in an RUD - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.