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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Last thoughts on Venus Express' orbit insertion

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I'm on the plane back from Germany and am going through my remaining notes from the Venus Express orbit insertion. All in all, the event had many contrasts to the last event I went to the European Space Operations Centre for: the landing of Huygens in January of 2005. The Huygens landing was tumultuous and emotional experience. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before. And it was being attempted not by NASA but by ESA, a much smaller agency with much smaller resources and very few previous missions (none of them successful landings!); many people I talked to before leaving on the trip harbored serious doubts that it would work, and thought it may well end like Beagle 2 had: having been released, the probe would never be heard from again.

The Huygens landing was a roller coaster: the nervous excitement of a hundred scientists and two hundred media; the triumphant early reception of a direct signal from Huygens by the Green Bank Telescope; the ten minutes of horrible silence from Channel A; the successful reception of the Channel B data; the absolutely astonishingly Earth-like images that appeared; the premature release of the images to the Web and the response of the amateur image processing community; the discovery of the failure to turn on the Channel A receiver and the apparent loss of the Doppler Wind Experiment; and its heroic recovery by the effort of Earth-based radio telescopes. Witnessing all that was an experience I'll never forget.

By contrast, Venus Express' orbit insertion was nearly routine, even for ESA. What made it routine was past experience with a nearly identical spacecraft, Mars Express, two years before. And, as events unfolded, everything happened exactly as planned; there's not much drama when events match predictions! Furthermore, unlike Huygens, Venus Express is an orbital mission that could last up to six years; it will produce a volume of data many hundreds or thousands of times what Huygens returned; and it's seeing a planet in a way that has been done before (though not quite as well), so the surprising results that Venus Express will produce will not likely be evident in its first images, but will instead be revealed in analysis of much more data over the coming months, years, even decades.

It's quite an accomplishment for ESA for its successes to become so ho-hum -- but there's a kind of risk there too. Late on Tuesday, I was wrapping up my work at ESOC and walking through a hallway when I ran into David Southwood, ESA's Science Director. Earlier in the day, before everything happened, I had congratulated him for the mission, and he admonished me not to congratulate him prematurely. Now, after everything was over and done with, he was much more relaxed (and willing to accept my congratulations!) He was rightfully very proud of the fact that Venus Express had been started and delivered to its target within his brief tenure, admitting to me that when he signed the agreement to start the mission even he didn't really expect it could all be done in only three years.

But Southwood was also a little bit concerned about having too much success, at least in planetary missions. I think he said something like "I keep expecting the hammer to fall." Excepting Beagle 2 (which very few people expected to succeed, though I must emphasize that Southwood did not say that to me), everything ESA has done in planetary exploration has been very successful: Mars Express, Huygens, SMART-1, Venus Express, and so far so good with Rosetta. The problem with all this success is that it does not prepare the European public well for failure. Space exploration is risky, Southwood said; and it's all right for NASA to fail once in a while, because they had many failures early on and overcame them, learning from them to build the mostly successful planetary exploration program they have now. ESA has, so far, beaten the odds, but Southwood worries about the reaction of the European public when, as it almost certainly will eventually, some spectacular failure happens. With its relatively limited resources ESA only gets to launch a planetary or astronomy mission every couple of years. If one failure calls a halt to that -- as the sequential failures of Mars Observer, Mars Polar Lander, and Mars Climate Orbiter did to NASA's Mars program -- it could set back European space science for years or cause permanent damage to the program by making the public (and consequently ESA) stiflingly risk-averse. I believe that ESA's Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain had exactly the same concern in mind when he said in his opening remarks: "It's risky. We are taking risks in space not because we like risk, but because it is the only way to get data."

While I was talking with Southwood, who should walk down the hall but Claudio Sollazzo? Claudio was the Mission Manager for Huygens, one of three ESA representatives who lived in Pasadena, California for years in order to coordinate the complicated planning of the Huygens release, descent, and data return with the Cassini mission management at JPL. I developed quite a fond regard for Claudio as he invited me in to several Huygens-related science meetings and as we worked with his team on the Huygens art contest. If the Huygens landing experience was a roller coaster for me, it was a hundred times so for Claudio, who was joyous about its success but simultaneously felt personally responsible for the chain of errors that had led to the loss of the Channel A data. The day after the landing, he told me in his typically expressive way: "I feel like Janus. On one side I am very excited and happy, on the other side there is a thorn in my heart." It's almost certain that nothing in the rest of Claudio's professional life will match the experience of Huygens, a prospect that must be wrenching for any leader to face. It was good to see him looking well, recovered from an experience so tumultuous and exhausting that it had left not only him but also many other members of the Huygens team (including its project scientist, Jean-Pierre Lebreton) so physically and emotionally drained that they were actually ill for several months afterward.

Late last night, I was sitting in the lobby messing around on the Internet when I spied Don McCoy, Venus Express' Project Manager, walk in the door with another Venus Express engineer guy (whose name I can only relay as "Frank from Holland"). I hadn't met McCoy before but I congratulated him and he invited me to join them in the hotel bar for an aperitif. When he was on the press conference panel in the morning he had reminded me strongly of several of the other project managers I've worked with in the past, like Jim Erickson and Mark Adler on the Mars Exploration Rover mission and Bob Mitchell on Cassini: they always seem very, very even-tempered, tending toward only the most subdued excitement about their missions, whether the events around them are wonderful or awful. ("I've seen everything, and I just can't get excited about it anymore," Erickson told me once.) Anyway, last night, McCoy was positively punchy -- for an engineer -- having just seen his spacecraft safely to Venus. I asked him something that I'd been wondering about since the morning: Venus Express has only just arrived, but McCoy and others were speaking of it as if it today marked the end. But he essentially said the same thing to me that Jean-Jacques Dordain had said in the morning's press conference; that the mission management and ESA administration really felt that the day had seen an ending of a kind. "I am happy and proud to deliver this mission to the scientists," Dordain had said. "It is your turn; Venus is your planet now." And, McCoy told me, the spacecraft now belongs to the scientists, it's there for them to do with it what they please. "Frank from Holland" agreed, saying that nothing about the mission was of any real importance except the science instruments and getting them to Venus, and that was now accomplished. We toasted the health of Venus Express. It seemed a fitting ending to the day.