ESA Venus Express Status Report November 2006

Mission Status

The management of the mission from the Project Team was handed over to RSSD after the successful completion of the Venus Express Commissioning Results Review held on 4 July at ESOC.

Payload and spacecraft operations have been running smoothly despite of four spacecraft safe mode entries since end of August. Their impact has been minimal, with the spacecraft back in nominal science mode within hours of each event.

Operations and Archiving

All instruments are performing nominally except PFS for which recovery measures are being discussed and tested.

Science Highlights

Results from the mission were presented at the Europlanet Science Conference in Berlin, 17-22 September. A joint publication of these results in Nature is under preparation.

Editor’s note

This report was prepared on 13 October 2006, and presented to the SPC on 7-8 November 2006.