AKATSUKI's first shots of Venus taken during health check

Given the failure of injecting AKATSUKI into the planned Venus orbit, the project team and a dedicated investigation team led by the ISAS Director are now conducting extensive analyses of its cause. Various functionality and health checks of the probe are now underway. As a result of this activity, we obtained images of Venus at around 9 a.m. on Dec 9th (JST).

The project team switched on the long wave infrared camera (LIR), ultraviolet imager (UVI), and 1 micron camera (IR1) to take images of Venus at the distance of 0.6 milion km*. Venus was pictured with the angular size of about 1.2 deg**.

* Distance between Earth and the moon is 0.38 milion km

** Angular size of the moon from the ground is about 0.5 deg.