Status Report

ESA Venus Express Status Report No. 49 – Conjunction Period Planning Completed

By SpaceRef Editor

October 30, 2006

Filed under ESA Venus Express Mission, US, Venus, Venus Express

20 Oct 2006 10:33

Report for Period 8 October to 14 October 2006

The reporting period contained a spacecraft hardware safe mode which occurred on DoY 282 04:20 UT.

The outage has caused the following impact at mission level:

science operations planned between 282.04.20 and 282.16.44 were lost

USO switched OFF for about 7 hours

VIRTIS operations were suspended from safe mode onward

The ground segment performance has been nominal throughout the reporting period.

The table below shows a chronology of the main activities in the reporting period:

MET (Day)	Date	DOY	VPER#	Main Activity
334	08/10/06	281	170	Routine science operations
335	09/10/06	282	171	Recovery after Safe Mode #5
336	10/10/06	283	172	Update of TM bit rate to 22853bps
337	11/10/06	284	173	Partial dump of PM3 RAM, ACM B switched on and period of generation of YAC00133 updated to 16 seconds
338	12/10/06	285	174	LFLV commanded to close
339	13/10/06	286	175	Full dump of PM3 RAM, Switch off of PM3 and PM 4 Uplink of command for the conjunction period
340	14/10/06	287	176	Routine science operations

At the end of the last Cebreros pass in the reporting period (DOY 287, 16:00z) Venus Express was orbiting Venus at 256 million km from the Earth. The one-way signal travel time was 855 seconds.

Science Update

The following set of images has been released since the previous status report.

20 October 2006
VIRTIS – Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer

Date: 22 July 2006 Description: Composite of three false-colour images of Venus’s night side at 1.7 μm, taken 30 minutes apart. Bright regions correspond to less cloud cover resulting in more radiation from lower altitudes to pass through.
Date: 29 July 2006 Description: Negative image of a VIRTIS observation of the Venus night side at 2.3 μm. By taking the negative image, bright regions now represent the areas of more cloud cover.