Good Luck Akatsuki!

On the evening of December 7 in 2010, I sat myself in a big-box bookstore with free WiFi in order to follow the progress of Akatsuki-kun as he approached his goal, Kinsei-chan (Venus), after a nearly seven month journey from Earth.  Akatsuki, or the Venus Climate Orbiter mission of Japan had been my goal for several years.  Early in my career as a graduate student studying the Venus clouds, I became aware of this planned Japanese planetary mission and quickly learned that their primary mission goals and intended mission instrumentation meshed very well with my research goals and objectives.  I spent the next several years working to ensure that I could play a role in helping our Japanese partners to explore Venus and its atmosphere.  I went so far as to begin to learn some Japanese so that I could more easily communicate with the mission team when the time came.  I was very fortunate to be selected by NASA as a participating scientist in residence at ISAS (essentially, JAXA's version of JPL).  I was looking forward to working with the scientists I had gotten to know over the previous few years, and to working with spacecraft imagery data that seemed designed specifically for the questions I had been pursuing in my research for nearly a decade.

Unfortunately, that day, Akatsuki's main engine suffered a malfunction which caused the spacecraft to shut down the burn that was intended to place it into orbit around Venus.  It quickly became clear that there would not be new observational data coming from Akatsuki over the succeeding few years as the spacecraft wound up orbiting the Sun instead of Venus, because it was unable to slow down sufficiently to be captured into orbit by Venus.  Within days NASA called me and the other participating scientists to let us know that we were no longer participating scientists and that our program would not be financially supported (it was just as well, it would have been difficult to achieve what we had proposed to do since there were no data to analyze).  However, soon after, JAXA announced that they might be able to make a second attempt at orbit insertion ... between five and seven years later.

Well, it is now five years later (to the day), and the wizards at JAXA have managed just that.  Tomorrow, 7 December 2015, from 0851 to 1130 Japan Standard Time (1651 to 1930, Mountain Standard Time, but it will be the evening of the 6th, there) the Akatsuki team will be following the result of years of effort as they monitor the second orbit insertion attempt of their spacecraft, this time using attitude control thrusters.  If the main rocket engine had a kick like turning on a fire hose, then the attitude control thrusters would be like eight water pistols.  The physics is the same, you just need to work a lot longer for the same amount of acceleration.

This time, however, I am very fortunate again, as I have had the opportunity to follow the proceedings from ISAS itself!  On this last day before VOI-R1 (JAXA's name for this second orbit insertion attempt), the team are running around, working very hard, and very long hours.  But, one can easily see the mix of cautious optimism and bone-deep fatigue that results from a determination to succeed combined with the awareness of all possible failure modes that need to be prepared for.  I hope that tomorrow morning, I can join them in an exuberant celebration of the culmination of a many years long journey that will make my 25-hour journey to get here pale by comparison.

あかつきチーム、頑張ってください！