Akatsuki enters orbit at Venus today!
In just a few hours, Venus will have a second orbiter. Japan’s Akatsuki is due to start firing its orbit insertion engines on December 7 at 08:49 Japan time (which is today, December 6, 23:49 UTC / 15:49 PST). There has already been a successful trajectory correction maneuver today, lining the spacecraft up for orbit insertion. A timeline of today’s plans is below. I edited it from a Google translation of this Japanese-language website, so ….