ESA's Venus Express has ended its eight-year mission after far exceeding its planned life. The spacecraft exhausted its propellant during a series of thruster burns to raise its orbit following the low-altitude aerobraking earlier this year.
Venus is our mysterious neighbour, a strange world where the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east, and a day lasts longer than a year.
After eight years in orbit, ESA's Venus Express has completed routine science observations and is preparing for a daring plunge into the planet's hostile atmosphere.
This reporting period covers four weeks of Venus Express operations. It includes continuation of the twenty-fourth eclipse season and the fifteenth Earth occultation season, implementation of the automation of spacecraft passes at the Mission Operations Centre, thermal fuel gauging tests, and handling of a spacecraft event time anomaly.
The European Space Agency has released its periodic report on the research being conducted the Venus Express orbiter. This one includes the end of the twenty-third eclipse season, end of the fourteenth Earth occultation season and continuation of the surface imaging campaign.
ESA's Venus Express has made unique observations of Venus during a period of reduced solar wind pressure, discovering that the planet's ionosphere balloons out like a comet's tail on its nightside.
Six years of observations by ESA's Venus Express have shown large changes in the sulphur dioxide content of the planet's atmosphere, and one intriguing possible explanation is volcanic eruptions.