During the press briefing, project manager Nakamura mentioned that these three cameras had been shielded from excessive solar heating by keeping other parts of the spacecraft rotated toward the Sun, including the high-gain antenna and other instruments. He is quoted as saying that the other instruments were "stressed" and that the instruments so stressed "saved" these three cameras. According to Imamura, the three camera instruments from which we do have images are healthy and "show no signs of degradation." The other three instruments from which we have not yet seen data are the 2-micron infrared camera (IR2), the lightning and airglow camera (LCA), and the ultrastable oscillator, which is part of a radio science experiment. I am guessing (but am not sure) that the ultrastable oscillator is what Nakamura was referring to when he mentioned that the "radio transmitter has been suspended as well".

The images are interesting because they were taken from a distance similar to the spacecraft's originally intended apoapsis distance, which is to say that they show the cameras' capabilities at the distance from Venus at which they were designed to be operated. They show what the lowest-resolution Venus images would have looked like, had the spacecraft successfully entered orbit in 2010. From the new orbit apoapsis of 440,000 kilometers, Venus will appear about one-seventh as large to these cameras.

Akatsuki's future plans

Nakamura said that the team will take three months to check out the spacecraft, its instruments, and operations in Venus orbit; science data acquisition will start in April. Project scientist Imamura said that we can consider Akatsuki to be a weather satellite for Venus, continuously imaging the planet for many days at a time, observing the 3D motions of the atmosphere. Although the new data set will mostly be lower in spatial resolution than hoped, it will actually be superior in temporal resolution to the original plan. And of course they will still get quite high-resolution data near periapsis, just less frequently. They will target specific phenomena for the rarer periapsis approaches. The shift toward a mission that studies how Venus changes over time means that Akatsuki's mission will be a better one, the longer and more continuously the spacecraft manages to operate in orbit; a two-year mission is the nominal plan, but Nakamura and Imamura expressed hope that it could be extended beyond that.

Capturing the public imagination

All three of the panelists agreed that Akatsuki wouldn't be a success without lots of support. Imamura singled out "space fans," and it does seem that Akatsuki's direct engagement with the public has been quite different from previous JAXA missions. Here is how Akatsuki's official Twitter account shared those new images: