Akatsuki: A Determined Little Spacecraft

The Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki, meaning "dawn" in Japanese, was successfully inserted into orbit above Venus earlier this week.  This is a great accomplishment for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) after the Venus Climate Orbiter overshot the planet five years ago.  The view of Venus below is one of the first images sent back by the spacecraft. 

According to JAXA, the little spacecraft has plenty of work do to while in orbit:

Meteorological information will be obtained by globally mapping clouds and minor constituents successively with 4 cameras at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths, detecting lightning with a high-speed imager, and observing the vertical structure of the atmosphere with radio science technique. The equatorial elongated orbit with westward revolution fits the observations of the movement and temporal variation of the Venusian atmosphere which rotates westward. The systematic, continuous imaging observations will provide us with an unprecedented large dataset of the Venusian atmospheric dynamics. Additional targets of the mission are the exploration of the ground surface and the observation of zodiacal light.

The Akatsuki was designed to complement the European Space Agency's (ESA) Venus Express, which went into orbit over the planet in 2006.  Venus Express could only wait so long.  ESA lost most contact with the spacecraft in November last year.  Fortunately, the spacecraft had accomplished its full mission by that point.