VEGA assists ESA in Venus Express
successful launch
9 November 2005 - VEGA Group PLC (VEGA), an independent
Programme and System Assurance company, has had a substantial
involvement in the preparation of the Venus Express
mission. Venus Express launched successfully at 4.33am (CET)
on 9 November 2005 to provide the most comprehensive study to date
of the Venusian atmosphere.
Venus Express, one of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) space
science missions, was created just three years ago - an unusually
short time scale for the planning of any mission – and used the
same design and industrial team as the successful Mars Express
mission, launched in June 2002. For this reason, VEGA has been
heavily involved in many aspects of Venus Express’
evolution. VEGA’s involvement extends from mission planning
and mission control, to developing the Ground Station and its data
preparation in Cebreros, Spain, developing the simulator for
training and fault analysis, through to providing operational
support on its pioneering journey.
A new area of involvement for VEGA for this mission is data
communications, connecting all mission elements together.
Neil Talbot, Communications Engineering Support Manager, commented,
“As part of the services provided to ESA, VEGA is engineering a
networking solution which will provide reliable delivery of
critical data, to the Science community. The service provided
entails the engineering of a ground segment network solution that
uses primarily a number of the ESA ground station facilities, along
with connectivity to the deep space network of NASA. In
addition to this capability, network connectivity solutions were
provided to enable testing of the satellite during the early
development stages and also at the launch site in Baikonur.”
Dave Whittle, Strategic Sales Director for Space, concluded,
“VEGA has been heavily involved in the Venus Express mission from
its concept and launch, and this will continue through the mission
duration. We are delighted that it launched successfully and look
forward to receiving insightful data when it reaches its
orbit.”
About Venus Express
Venus Express is expected to take 162 days to reach its Venus
orbit, and take a further 3 weeks to manoeuvre into its operational
orbit. The satellite has been built using the same design of
Mars Express, making it cheaper and quicker to develop.
Its main objectives is to study the Earth’s nearest neighbour,
its atmosphere, which is believed to be more than 95% carbon
dioxide, and look at the apparent ‘greenhouse effect’, which could
be indicative of the result on Earth in years to come. It will
also look at the dynamic clouds and mysterious ultraviolet markings
detected above the cloud and observe the unexplained fast
atmospheric rotation around the planet and the polar vortices. When
in its orbit around Venus the mission is to last 2 Venusian days,
which corresponds to 486 days on Earth.