The first space mission in over 10 years to Earth's closest neighbor Venus emitted its first signal yesterday after a successful launch from the Russian cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
"The baby cried. Venus Express has begun its operational mission," said Jean-Pierre Cau, an official from EADS Astrium, the company that built the spacecraft's propulsion system, after receiving the signal.
Venus Express separated successfully from the Soyuz Fregat carrier rocket more than 90 minutes after its 03:33am launch at the start of a 163-day journey to Venus.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) first probe to the planet, Venus Express will explore its unusual stormy atmosphere and runaway global warming in the hope of better understanding Earth's greenhouse-gas problem.
Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is similar in size, mass and age to Earth but has a vastly different and ferociously hot weather system.
Also known as the Evening Star, thanks to the bright light it reflects from the Sun, the planet is blanketed by thick clouds of suffocating gas driven by often hurricane-force winds and a surface pressure and temperature high enough to crush and melt lead.
The planet's clouds reflect back 80 percent of the Sun's radiation and absorb another 10 percent, leaving just 10 percent to filter down to the surface.
But the clouds provide such effective insulation the surface zone becomes a pressure cooker capable of melting metal.
"Venus has no surface water, a toxic, heavy atmosphere made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid, and at the surface the atmospheric pressure is over 90 times that of Earth at sea-level," the ESA notes.
The planet's searing surface temperature of 477 Celsius -- the hottest in the Solar System -- and immense atmospheric pressure have caused many previous missions to fail or send data streams lasting only minutes before their instruments were crushed.
It is hoped, however, that the 1.27-tonne unmanned Venus Express orbiter will be able to use seven powerful instruments on board to map the planet's surface and weather system, looking at temperature variation, cloud formations, wind speeds and gas composition.
After a 163-day journey, the craft is scheduled to arrive off Venus in April, when it will be placed in an elliptical orbit, swooping to as low as 250km above the surface to a height of 66,000km.
The orbiter, whose total mission costs are US$264 million, has enough fuel to operate for 1,000 Earth days, the ESA says.
The first mission to Venus in 1961 saw a Soviet-made probe lose communications with ground control about 7 million kilometers from Earth.
The following year the US Mariner 2 became the first successful interplanetary mission.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS