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  2. Earth
    1. ISS
    2. Aqua
    3. GOES-14
    4. JWST
  3. Moon
    1. LADEE
    2. NRHO
  4. Mercury
    1. MESSENGER
  5. Venus
    1. Venus Express
  6. Mars
    1. MRO
    2. MAVEN
  7. Interplanetary
    1. MAVEN transfer

Venus Express

Venus orbit

Files

Click here to download the trajectory.
Click here to download the run options file.

Description

Venus Express was a European Space Agency (ESA) mission to observe the Venusian atmosphere.  It orbited Venus for more than 8 years before it began to lose contact with mission control; it is believed to have been destroyed in early 2015.  Venus Express used a highly elliptic, nearly polar orbit that did not precess.

Venus Express’s altitude ranged from a couple hundred km to more than 60,000 km above Venus.  Like all objects on eccentric orbits, it spent most of its time near near apoapsis. It will therefore benefit very little from planetary shielding; additionally, meteoroid fluxes and speeds are higher closer to the Sun.

Graphics

Trajectory in inertial frame

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Trajectory in Sun-centered ecliptic frame

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Meteoroid flux and properties

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Meteoroid directionality in body-fixed frame

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