Valentine Venus

Here’s the sky on the evening of Valentine’s Day.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

Not Valentine eve, which would be the evening before.  I had to choose between Thursday the 13th and Friday the 14th.  But neither will be even half unlucky for you.  Have a romantic supper at a window with a view!

Venus is coming around nearer to us – it has just come within the distance of 1 astronomical unit, the same distance as the Sun – and is shining at magnitude 4.4.  It will slide northward through the ecliptic on Feb. 15, and will reach easternmost elongation – its farthest out into the evening sky – on March 24.

Or, should I say, She will?  I’ve just started on the happy work of writing the “Goddess” section of my Venus book, having ground through some research on the spacecraft missions to the inhospitable planet.

Those turned out to be more engrossing than I expected.  I now appreciate better the work that Clifford Cunningham used to do each year for his “Spaceflight” section in my Astronomical calendar.

There have been, I find, 43 such missions or attempted missions – 15 of them failed, owing to hardware or software.  Many of the earliest, from 1961 onward, were operated by the Soviet Union and called Venera.  The last three were all launched by JAXA. the Japanese space agency, on 2010 May 20, from one rocket.

They were called Akatsuki (“dawb”), IKAROS (an acronym, but alluding to the rash youth who flew too near to the Sun, so that the wax holding his wings together melted), and Shin’en (“profound”).

Akatsuki, the main one, failed to get into Venus orbit as it flew by Venus, and the scientists had to wait while it circulated around the Sun for exactly five years until it was in position for a second try; that succeeded, as did the rest of its mission.

IKAROS was the first interplanetary demonstration of the beautiful propulsion method called solar sailing: gentle but accumulating acceleration by the pressure of sunlight.  The idea dates back, in a sense, to Kepler’s observation that the gas tails of comets are driven straight outward from the Sun.  IKAROS consisted of little more than a payload of two cameras and a huge thin sail, around whose edges were eighty liquid crystal cells: by sending commands to change the reflectance of cells, the engineers could control the attitude and direction of the craft without use of fuel.  IKAROS flew by Venus two days after Akatsuki’s unintended flyby; its mission, however, was to observe not Venus but interplanetary space, and to learn more about solar sail navigation.

As for Shin’en, it was built by a consortium of students from several universities, and carried computers, also built in the universities, to be tested in space.  Released like the others from the launching rocket, it did get out of Earth orbit into the heliocentric orbit that should have taken it to Venus.  But communication with it was lost within minutes.  It may still be visiting Venus, silently.

And three other small student-built non-interplanetary craft were launched along with those three.  A colorful fireworks burst from Japan!

Now, Akatsuki also carried about ninety aluminum plates engraved with the names and messages contributed by 260,214 people.  And a curious specimen of modern Japanese popular culture: pictures of a “super-deformed” artificial nymph with a “Vocaloid” synthetic voice,

I don’t want to cap your Valentine Day with kitsch.  Here is Botticelli’s rendering of Venus as, born from the roam, aphros, that gave her her Greek name Aphrodite, she rode a conch shell to the shore of Cythera, the first of the islands that became sacred to her.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.