Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki Mission: mission and targets

Project start

May 20, 2010

Declared end

not declared

The start the archive declares is the start of the project, not the launch, and an end it does not declare does not mean the mission is still running.

Targets you can open in 3D:

• Venus

A declared target is what the archive files the mission’s data under, not a record of observation.

The main goal of the mission of Akatsuki, also known as Venus Climate Orbiter (VCO) and PLANET-C is to understand the Venusian atmospheric dynamics, super-rotation, and cloud physics, with the explorations of the ground surface and the interplanetary dust also being the themes. The Venusian atmosphere was studied during the Venus Express mission of the European Space Agency. Akatsuki was also designed to study the Venusian atmosphere, but in contrast to the Venus Express strategy, five cameras with narrowband filters will image Venus at different wavelengths to track the distributions of clouds and minor gaseous constituents at different heights. In other words, we aim to study the Venusian atmospheric dynamics in three dimensions, while Venus Express collected mainly spectroscopic observations of the atmosphere. The mission started with the mission name and the spacecraft name PLANET-C, which means Japan's third planetary explorer succeeding SUISEI (PLANET-A), which observed Halley's comet, and NOZOMI (PLANET-B), which could not complete its mission to explore Mars.

Quoted in English, as the archive publishes it, read on October 4, 2026.

Identifier in the archive, which is its citation: urn:jaxa:darts:context:investigation:mission.vco

NASA Planetary Data System, PDS Registry, investigation context products. Dates and targets read on September 29, 2026; how to cite the archive: https://pds.nasa.gov/datastandards/citing/

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