Mirror Jams on Venus Express Spacecraft 31
tsarina writes "The European Space Agency is trying to fix a stuck instrument on its Venus Express spacecraft. A mirror in front of its interferometer is not pointing in the right direction, making it useless until it is moved. Managers hope to fix the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer this week. An identical instrument on the Mars Express probe has also acted up, but it is currently working properly.""
Obligatory Wiki Link (Score:1, Informative)
You can see that it analyses the atmosphere from the ground to 100km, but is only one of about 7 instruments.
Oh yeah, and first post.
Re:With the string of bad luck the ESA has had, (Score:5, Informative)
I work in the flight dynamics team for VenusExpress at ESA and I can't let this comment stand. Even though the poster meant it as a joke (I hope ;), I don't think having smarter people is the issue. I think it is a matter of experience and money.
We are just beginning to expand beyond near-earth to the interplanetary part of space exploration. VenusExpress is only our fourth interplanetary mission (we count going to the moon as interplanetary). Nonethless, we've arrived at Venus without any problems in the spacecraft systems (this excludes instruments). We've reached our target orbit to within 0.3 seconds (sic!). We only could do this by applying what we'd learned on the previous missions; Smart-1, Rosetta, and MarsExpress.
As for money, our budget is a tenth of NASA's budget. To save cost, VenusExpress was basically built from MarsExpress spare parts. This brings a few problems with it, due to the different geometries: Venus being so much closer to the Sun than Mars, and being inside Earth's orbit poses a whole new set of thermal problems.