The final Venus mission has officially ended when the Venus Climate Orbiter of Japan, Akatsuki, has gone silent. The spacecraft, which was developed by the institute of space and astronautical science (ISAS), a subsidiary of Japan aerospace exploration agency (JAXA), was not only famous due to its contribution to science, but also due to the presence of a virtual pop star, which was a distinctive cultural aspect that attracted the attention of people. According to the latest report of September 18, 2025, Akatsuki is not talking, and Venus has no active missions anymore in the immediate future, which shows a considerable hiatus in the process of exploring the planet. This follows the loss of communication by the probe in late April 2024, the termination works being performed by JAXA over a year afterwards, highlighting the difficulties of carrying out long-duration space operations under demanding conditions.
Akatsuki Mission Overview
The Akatsuki spacecraft or Venus Climate Orbiter was mainly meant to examine the climate and atmosphere of Venus. It was to offer information about the meteorological phenomenon of the planet including the dense cloud cover and the super rotating atmosphere where the winds rotated around the planet 60 times faster than the rotation of the planet. The Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), a major participant in the Japanese space sector and also the history of innovative missions to the planets, spearheaded the design and operations of the spacecraft. The mission of Akatsuki was a larger project aimed at increasing our knowledge of planetary climates which provided useful information to the scientific community by analyzing Venus as a possible counterpart to studying runaway greenhouse effects that may be used to study the climate change on Earth. Akatsuki was designed with five specialized cameras and instruments, such as an infrared camera to observe the dense clouds, an ultraviolet imager to chart the three dimensional make up of the atmosphere, and a radio science instrument to determine the gravity fields of Venus in the atmosphere, lightning and the presence of volcanoes on the surface.
Through the period of its operation, it exposed information on the sulfuric acid clouds, the equatorial jets and the polar vortices present in the planet, with information that refuted earlier conceptions of the weather of Venus. Akatsuki had one of the most interesting components by including a virtual pop star in the mission. The idea behind this new way of communicating with the public was to etch images of the Japanese Vocaloid character Hatsune Miku onto aluminum plates on board the space ship, and messages submitted by the public. It was a creative approach that was intended to attract attention to the mission and make younger generations interested in space exploration and combine anime culture with the innovative science. Incorporating aspects of Japanese culture into its scientific activities, ISAS showed the innovative approach to closing the gap between science and the popular culture, making the mission more approachable and appealing to the masses and it was indeed effective as the scientific probe gained extensive media coverage and became the symbol of technologically advanced Japan intertwined with the world of entertainment.
Key Milestones and Operations
The trip of Akatsuki to Venus was characterized by some milestones. The spacecraft first missed entering the orbit of Venus in December 2010 following a failure in its main engine caused by a plugged fuel line (a result of oxidized propellant) after a successful launch on May 21, 2010, out of the Tanega Shima Space Center, on an H-IIA rocket. But within the next five years, ISAS engineers were able to correct the trajectory with the smaller attitude control thrusters of the probe and Akatsuki was able to enter an elliptical orbit around Venus on December 7, 2015, becoming the first successful planetary orbiter since the moon in Japanese history. Per this recovery was an indication of engineering ingenuity with the team firing the thrusters in a burst fashion to slowly adjust the course, as they orbited the Sun. After reaching orbit, it commenced its main science program in April 2016, and is beginning to gather a large amount of data about the atmosphere on the planet, including finding massive stationary gravity waves that cause the super-rotation, and demonstrating active volcanism through infrared imaging. It garnered a great wealth of information about the atmosphere of the planet over the years, which was useful in our knowledge of the atmospheric weather events and climate phenomena, including the surprising stability of the cloud tops and the variations in the levels of sulfur dioxide, which indicate ongoing geologic processes. Its mission was much longer than anticipated, lasting almost 10 years in orbit around Venus even though the conditions were rather hostile, such as the high levels of solar radiation and the effect of thermal loads. The spacecraft operated by regular data downlinks to the earth, and the solar panels provided power to the spacecraft, and the instruments were cycled through the observation modes to capture the transitions between day and night. Akatsuki supported the Bepi Colombo flyby carried out by the European Space Agency in 2018 with vital complementary atmospheric information. The news of the mission ending of Akatsuki on September 18, 2025, was explained by technical problems, which consisted in the loss of power or an instrument failure, namely, the impossibility to maintain contact after losing the attitude in April 2024. Such issues are typical of long-duration space missions, at which the harsh conditions of the environment and the constraints of the existing technology can cause the eventual shutdown of functions, yet due to Akatsuki long life, the satellite had more than 3,000 orbits and terabytes of data. Nevertheless, these failures hint at the dedication and the success of Japan in planetary science, and the willingness to overcome all the challenges to achieve knowledge, which will lead to future missions such as NASA’s VERITAS and DAVINCI, which is likely to be launched in the late 2020s.
Historical Precedents for Silent Spacecraft
Akatsuki is not the only space exploration that has remained silent. In 2017, such an idea was demonstrated by the example of the project called The Silent Star, which focused on the problem of the dormancy of space-related narratives and the issues of the functioning of the active missions during long durations of time. This cultural allusion can be traced to the 1960s science fiction movie The Silent Star (alternatively, First Spaceship on Venus), which explored a plane wrecked voyage to Venus and discovered alien relics, to give the reader an idea of how the cycle of space missions functions and how the end is always near.
The Silent Star, in turn, is a reminder of the temporality of such projects and the fact that missions lose their relevance either because of technical issues or resource depletion, as in the case of the plot in the movie showing the dangers of exploring the uncharted worlds. In the same way, in 2015 Bill Nye and his LightSail solar sailing spacecraft had communication problems, which explain the challenges of experimental propulsion technologies. The Planetary Society under the leadership of Bill Nye with the LightSail mission was a mission that was to prove that solar sailing was viable and using the sunlight pressure acting on the large reflective sails a small CubeSat could be transported without fuel. LightSail 1 was released in May 2015, and soon after, had software bugs and battery issues, which caused a loss of communication, which lasted several days before being restored.
This incident can bring out the experimental surrounding of most space missions and the risks associated with pushing technology to its limits as the team was forced to restart systems over distances and even modify the deployment of sails due to rolling movements. LightSail 1 eventually succeeded in deploying a sail, however, its successor LightSail 2 in 2019 was able to conduct controlled solar sailing, extending to a period of more than three years before returning to the atmosphere of the Earth in 2022. The persistence necessary to make space exploration, as demonstrated by LightSail by Bill Nye, is that early silence or failure can result in the design of successful designs and success.
Other precedents are NASA Pioneer 10 which became silent in 2003, 31 years after being the first to fly by Jupiter and travel between stars, but went dead due to the loss of power produced by its radioisotope generators. Similarly, the Mars rover Opportunity announced its death due to a dust storm that had covered its solar panels in 2019, a 15-year study had lasted 90 times longer than its expected 90-day mission. The lessons of these past missions are valuable to future missions to have well-designed engineering solutions and contingency plans, including redundant communication systems, autonomous recovery plans, and autonomous recovery plans. The quiet like the previous ones of Akatsuki is an ode to how tough space exploration is and how resilient the teams involved in them are. These experiences will guide future technology and plans to make future space activities a success like more robust power supplies and AI-based fault tolerance to increase the mission duration in hostile environments.
