dianeduane | The Morning Star has a new neighbor

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The Venus Express has successfully gone into orbit. Yay ESA!

After the end of the main engine burn, Venus Express still had to perform a few automatic operations. These included re-orienting the solar panels towards the Sun and one of its high gain antennas (the smaller High Gain Antenna 2) towards Earth.

It is through this antenna that the spacecraft established the first communication link with Earth and started to send back information about its health status. The spacecraft data are sent to ESA’s European Spacecraft Operations Centre (ESOC) via ESA’s Cebreros ground station near Madrid. The data downlink lasts for a few hours.

(Long enough for him to start blogging, it looks like. Wonder if that downlink counts as broadband?)

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posicat.livejournal.com

Interesting, I hadn't heard about this probe even being launched. From what I saw on the ESA website, it's based on the Mars Express design. The instruments onboard should bring back some really interesting information about Venus.

All this space exploration lately has been amazing. Not only are we seeing sights we never would have seen, some of our probes are reaching out and poking and prodding at the planets they land on. To me all these images feel like home, this is our solar system, where we live, we may be stuck on one planet for the present, but there are places we can go. Sure, it won't be easy, but things worth doing often arn't.

I guess the moment I'm waiting for is long after Spirit and Opertunity have stopped transmitting. That moment, when suddenly a signal from one of them returns to the airwaves, an image transmits from the lander of a human face, at the same time a voice is broadcast from a nearby space suit "Hey, it looks like it's working."