Venus Express

The European Space Agency and the Russian-European company Starsem signed an agreement on launching the device in June 2003. . The launch of the vehicle was scheduled for October 26, 2005 from the Baikonur cosmodrome using the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle and the Fregat upper stage .

On October 21, 2005, the start was postponed to a later date due to a violation of the screen-vacuum thermal insulation of the upper stage in preparation for the start ^[3] . The launch window was open until November 26th .

November 3, the press service of the Federal Space Agency issued a statement that the launch of the device will take place on November 9 .

On November 9, 2005, at 6 hours 33 minutes Moscow time (3:33 UTC ), the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle (11A511U-FG No. 010 ^[4] ) with the interplanetary station Venera Express successfully launched from the launch pad No. 31 of the Baikonur cosmodrome . 8 minutes 48 seconds after the start, the head unit consisting of the interplanetary vehicle and the Fregat upper stage (No. 1010 ^[4] ) was put into an intermediate, open orbit with an inclination of 51.8 ° and separated from the third stage of the launch vehicle. 96 minutes after the start, the device was put on the departure path to Venus by the second impulse of the engine of the upper stage unit. After that, the RB “Fregat” was separated, the station automatically navigated around the Sun , deployed solar panels, and approximately two hours after launch, contacted the European Space Administration Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt , Germany . All the systems of the Venus Express station worked in the normal mode and it continued its autonomous flight in the interplanetary space until it entered the near-Venerian orbit, which was carried out on April 11, 2006 .

On April 11, 2006, the device, having turned on the engine for 50 minutes and slowed down, went to an intermediate strongly extended orbit around the planet (with a pericenter of about 400 kilometers and an apocenter of 350 thousand kilometers). After that, with the help of additional maneuvers, a transition was made to a near-polar working orbit with a perihespéry of only 250 kilometers and an apohespéry of 66 thousand kilometers, with a circulation period of 24 hours.

On April 12, the previously not photographed Venus South Pole was first removed from the station. Low-resolution test photographs were taken using a VIRTIS spectrometer from a height of 206,452 kilometers above the surface. Despite the preliminary nature of the images made, European scientists were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the equipment and their scientific value: in the atmosphere of Venus, just above the south pole, a dark funnel was discovered, similar to the formation above the north pole of the planet.

On May 6, at 23 hours 49 minutes Moscow time (19:49 UTC), the station of distant space communication in Australia received a station signal confirming that it occupied a working orbit with an orbital period of 18 hours.

The European probe began to malfunction on March 7, 2012, after X- class X5.4 X-ray flash occurred on the Sun, resulting in the failure of star navigation sensors, which monitor its orientation and position in space by tracking the position of bright stars. Specialists were forced to turn off the sensors and transfer the orientation system of the spacecraft to work with the help of gyroscopes. But already on March 9, the performance of the navigation star sensors was fully restored. ^[five]

It was originally planned that the study of Venus will last at least 500 Earth days (about two Venusian years). Subsequently, the mission was regularly extended to the beginning of May 2009, December 31, 2009 ^[6] , December 31, 2012 ^[7] . In the summer of 2014, it was planned that the device would function at least until the end of 2016 ^[8] , however, on November 28, 2014, the device lost altitude control, apparently due to the exhaustion of fuel reserves. It was expected that in late January or early February 2015, the station would enter the dense atmosphere of Venus and burn down ^{[9] [10] [11]} .

• dimensions of the spacecraft 1.5 × 1.8 × 1.4 m;
• starting weight 1250 kg;
• rocket fuel weight 570 kg;
• payload of 90 kg.

According to the equipment, "Venus Express" largely copies its Mars prototype " Mars Express ". Spectrometers operating in the ultraviolet and infrared ranges, as well as the ASPER instrument for analyzing circumplanetary plasma , are components of the Martian apparatus. They added the mapping spectrometer VIRTIS, inherited from the Rosette mission.

From the "original" devices designed specifically for this mission, we can distinguish a magnetometer for measuring the magnetic field in the vicinity of the planet and a miniature digital camera. The camera will photograph the clouds and the surface of the planet at intervals of from 5 seconds to tens of minutes.

With the participation of Russian scientists, a planetary Fourier spectrometer PFS and an atmospheric spectrometer SPICAV ( Eng. Spectroscopy for Investigation of Atmosphere of Venus ) were manufactured. In addition, in almost all experiments, Russian scientists will act as co-investigators of international research teams.

The project cost is about 300 million euros.

• Project page on the ESA website
• Pavel Sharov. Europeans on Venus (rus.) // Around the World : Journal. - 2007. - April 1st. - ISSN 0321-0669 .
• Dmitry Tomilov. Towards the morning star (Rus.) . Lenta.ru (November 9, 2005). The appeal date is December 18, 2016.