Japanese scientists say the recent failure of a space probe to achieve orbit around Venus will likely cause them to scale back their space program's goals.
While scientists work to figure out what caused the Akatsuki spacecraft to overshoot Venus on the night of Dec. 6, the miss — coupled with the 2003 failure of Japan's only other interplanetary effort, the Nozomi mission to Mars — has already caused Japanese scientists to reconsider their future efforts.
"Our score is zero wins, two losses," Takehiko Satoh of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency told SPACE.com at the 2010 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. "We have to be more conservative to plan our next planetary mission, so it will never fail in any aspect."
After a voyage of more than six months, the $300 million Akatsuki probe got within a few hundred miles of Venus and began firing its thrusters to place itself in orbit around the planet.
The thrusters, meant to fire for 12 minutes, quit after just 2 1/2 minutes, causing the spacecraft to fly right past the planet. Satoh said a pressure drop in a fuel line caused the thrusters to stop firing.
"The pressure decrease was the direct cause," Satoh said. "But we don't know why the pressure shut down."
The probe's failure will have a big impact on how JAXA plans future planetary missions, including a proposed mission to Mars, he said.
"With Mars exploration, so many scientists want a big lander or a big rover," Satoh said. "If we had previous successes with planetary orbital insertions, we might say, OK, we'll try something big. But now, maybe we can do an orbiter and a very small lander or a small rover."
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