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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.
Long wave infrared camera (LIR) : 10 micron (wavelength)
Field of View: 12.4 deg x 16.4 deg
Number of pixels: 248 x 328
Venus taken with LIR (zoom)
[Right] Image with LIR (full image)
Ultraviolet imager (UVI): 365 nm (wavelength)
Field of View: 12 deg x 12 deg
Number of pixels: 1024 x 1024
[Left] Venus taken with UVI (zoom)
[Right] Image with UVI (full image)
N.B. Left image is artificially colored.
1 micron camera (IR1) : 0.9 micron (wavelength)
Field of View: 12 deg x 12 deg
Number of pixels: 1024 x 1024
[Left] Venus taken with IR1 (zoom)
[Right] Image with IR1 (full image)
N.B. Left image is artificially colored.
Comparison of images in the same scale
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N.B. Images are artificially colored (UVI image - blue; IR1 image - red)
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December 10, 2010