GERMANY: Europe's first space probe to Venus slipped smoothly into the planet's orbit yesterday and sent its first signals from there to Earth, ground controllers said.
The 1.3 tonne Venus Express took off on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan last November, travelling 400 million km through space on a mission scheduled to last 486 days.
"Everything went as it was planned, clearly, without difficulties," Gaele Winters, European Space Agency (ESA) director of operations, told a news conference. "This is a great success," he said.
Priced at a relatively modest €220 million and built by firms from 14 countries, the Venus Express underlines the ambition of European scientists to be at the cutting edge of exploring the scope and origins of the universe.
"It all comes back to the basic question that I'm sure just about everybody has asked - how did we turn up here out of all that?" said David Southwood, director of science at ESA.
Venus Express will take another four weeks to reach its operational orbit before sending back data from a hellish atmosphere made up mainly of carbon monoxide and clouds of sulphuric acid where temperatures average 450 degrees. But in other respects, including size, mass and composition, Venus closely resembles Earth and scientists will use the data to look for answers as to why so near a counterpart has evolved so differently over the last 4,600 million years.
Shrouded by a layer of clouds 20km thick and buffeted by extremes of temperature and pressure, Venus is Earth's nearest planetary neighbour but is an enigma to science.
Its dense atmosphere creates a supercharged greenhouse effect.