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Emily Lakdawalla • Dec 06, 2010
Akatsuki enters orbit at Venus today!
In just a few hours, Venus will have a second orbiter. Japan's Akatsuki is due to start firing its orbit insertion engines on December 7 at 08:49 Japan time (which is today, December 6, 23:49 UTC / 15:49 PST). There has already been a successful trajectory correction maneuver today, lining the spacecraft up for orbit insertion. (EDIT: This was not correct; I misunderstood the Google translation. The last rocket firing was on December 1.) A timeline of today's plans is below. I edited it from a Google translation of this Japanese-language website, so any errors are mine.
| Date/time (UTC) | Time w.r.t. closest approach | Event |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 6 23:49:00 | - 11m | Orbit insertion burn begins |
| 23:50:43 | - 9m | Ground station communication blackout expected |
| Dec 7 00:01:00 | +1m | End orbit insertion burn |
| 00:12:03 | +12m | Communication should resume |
| 00:36:37 | +37m | Enter into Venus' shadow |
| 01:40:44 | +1h 41m | Exit from Venus' shadow |
| 01:59:00 | +2h | Orient attitude to Earth for orbit determination |
| 03:09:00 | +3h | Switch between medium-and high-gain antennas |
| 12:00:00 | +12h | Orbit determination should be complete; decide if further course correction necessary |
Via Twitter I've heard that there will be a live webcast (in Japanese of course) beginning at 23:00 UTC / 15:00 PST at this website.
Since the orbit insertion happens during after-school time for me, I am, sadly, not going to be able to follow it live, though I'll be monitoring Twitter when I can. I recommend following cosmos4u; you may also want to bookmark the Google translation of Akatsuki's own Twitter feed and the Google translation of the mission website. For any machine-translated websites, wherever you see the word "somehow," you should mentally replace it with "Akatsuki."
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