Japan's Venus Orbiter
Akatsuki (meaning "Dawn") is JAXA's Venus Climate Orbiter. After a failed orbit insertion in December 2010 due to a main engine malfunction, the spacecraft spent five years orbiting the Sun before engineers devised a daring rescue — using attitude control thrusters to achieve Venus orbit in December 2015. It was the first successful Venus orbital insertion by any Asian space agency.
Studying Venus's Extreme Weather
Akatsuki carries five cameras covering ultraviolet to thermal infrared wavelengths, revealing Venus's super-rotating atmosphere (winds 60× faster than the planet's rotation), massive bow-shaped cloud features stretching 10,000 km, and equatorial jet streams. Its observations fundamentally changed our understanding of atmospheric dynamics on rocky planets.
Silence at Venus
JAXA lost contact with Akatsuki in April 2024 after an attitude-control problem left it unable to point its antenna at Earth. After more than a year of failed recovery attempts, the agency formally ended the mission on 18 September 2025 — leaving Venus, for the first time in a decade, with no active orbiter.