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No more doubts about ESA's Venus Express!
by the European Space Agency
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Artist's impression of Venus Express orbiting
Venus
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| 6 November
2002
Yesterday, ESA's Science Programme Committee (SPC)
gave the final go-ahead for the Venus Express mission. The SPC, which met
on 4 and 5 November 2002, unanimously confirmed its strong will to bring
the mission to realisation. Furthermore, the Committee endorsed and agreed
on a solution to the financial issues that had still cast serious doubts
on the mission.
On 11 July 2002, Europe took a step closer to
Venus. At that time, the ESA Science Programme Committee had agreed
unanimously to start work on Venus Express. Venus Express would have
reused the Mars Express spacecraft design and needed to be ready for
launch in 2005. Since then, ESA invested 7 million Euros to start the
first mission design phase. However, the mission's fate was not yet final
because one nation, Italy, still had not confirmed its participation in
the payload. Italy was given until October 2002 to provide its final
commitment.
At the deadline, Italy could not completely commit to the financial
support required for the payload under their responsibility. To rescue the
mission, however, the ESA Science Management in collaboration with the
Italian Space Agency (ASI) came to several financial proposals, one of
which was eventually endorsed by SPC.
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Ultraviolet image of the planet
Venus
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| The Italian
contribution to Venus Express will consist of the spare parts of the
VIRTIS and PFS experiments and to the ASPERA instrument. ESA will
financially contribute to the rest, for an amount of 8.5 million Euros.
This amount also covers the integration and testing of the parts of the
instruments Italy has taken on and anything else needed to fill other
possible gaps to allow the Italian instruments to fly.
In exchange for ESA's support, the VIRTIS Science team will be further
Europeanised.
ESA's management, the Science Programme Committee, the European
scientific community, and the national space agencies have worked hard to
get this far. ESA Science Director, Professor Southwood, at the end of the
SPC works, said: "I'm extremely proud that the SPC managed to bring
things together. Now we can clearly say to the scientists and industry: go
to work to go to Venus!"
With Venus Express, ESA is the only agency world-wide with current
plans to visit all the internal planets of the Solar System. However, both
Japan and the United States have plans for future missions to Venus.
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