Japan’s pioneering Akatsuki spacecraft, the last active probe orbiting Venus, has bid its final farewell.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) officially terminated the Venus Climate Orbiter’s mission on September 18, 2025, drawing the curtain on an extraordinary scientific journey spanning over a decade.
Launched from Tanegashima Space Center on May 21, 2010, Akatsuki (meaning “Dawn”) faced adversity from the outset. Its first attempt to enter Venus orbit in December 2010 failed due to an engine malfunction, sending the probe looping around the Sun for five years.
Against daunting odds, mission engineers expertly used Akatsuki’s secondary thrusters to guide it into Venus orbit in December 2015, making it Japan’s first planetary orbiter beyond Earth.
Once slung into orbit, Akatsuki commenced a remarkable scientific mission, observing Venus’s dense, hostile atmosphere for more than eight years. It revolutionised planetary meteorology by uncovering the largest stationary gravity waves ever recorded in the solar system, a “mountain wave” spanning thousands of kilometres above Venus’s surface.
Akatsuki also revealed new details of the planet’s super-rotating winds, where the upper atmosphere circles Venus far faster than its surface. By pioneering data assimilation techniques, commonplace in terrestrial weather research, Akatsuki advanced the study of extraterrestrial climate systems in ways never seen before.
JAXA lost contact with Akatsuki in April 2024, after the probe entered a low-precision attitude control mode near the end of its operational lifespan. Despite extensive recovery attempts, communication was never reestablished. Ageing, technical challenges, and the sheer longevity of the mission led JAXA to conclude operations this week.
With Akatsuki’s departure, Earth is left with no spacecraft currently orbiting Venus. Yet the mission’s legacy endures, not just in the hundreds of scientific papers it inspired, but also in the promise that future Venus missions will build on its trailblazing achievements.
All eyes are now on multiple missions under development from Nasa, European Space Agency and Isro to explore Earth’s mysterious twin in the coming years.
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