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Venus Express is set to take off

Tim Radford

LONDON: European scientists are preparing to monitor the neighbour from hell. Venus Express, a robot spacecraft little bigger than a refrigerator, is to be the first mission in 15 years to the second rock from the sun.

Venus is 4.6 billion years old, of similar diameter and mass to the earth, and made of the same kind of rocks. It occupies the same neighbourhood and should be warm and welcoming, like earth. But it is not.

Fred Taylor, of the University of Oxford, said: "It's very disturbing that we do not understand the climate on a planet so much like the earth. It is telling us that we really don't understand the earth. We have ended up with a lot of mysteries."

Venus Express will take off on October 26, from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. A second upper-stage Fregat rocket will push it on to a 162-day trajectory towards Venus. During April the spacecraft will be sent pirouetting as close as 248 km around its partner, and then soaring 65,600 km away. It will do this for 500 earth days.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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