TY - JOUR AU - Nakamura, Masato AU - Imamura, Takeshi AU - Ishii, Nobuaki AU - Abe, Takumi AU - Kawakatsu, Yasuhiro AU - Hirose, Chikako AU - Satoh, Takehiko AU - Suzuki, Makoto AU - Ueno, Munetaka AU - Yamazaki, Atsushi AU - Iwagami, Naomoto AU - Watanabe, Shigeto AU - Taguchi, Makoto AU - Fukuhara, Tetsuya AU - Takahashi, Yukihiro AU - Yamada, Manabu AU - Imai, Masataka AU - Ohtsuki, Shoko AU - Uemizu, Kazunori AU - Hashimoto, George L. AU - Takagi, Masahiro AU - Matsuda, Yoshihisa AU - Ogohara, Kazunori AU - Sato, Naoki AU - Kasaba, Yasumasa AU - Kouyama, Toru AU - Hirata, Naru AU - Nakamura, Ryosuke AU - Yamamoto, Yukio AU - Horinouchi, Takeshi AU - Yamamoto, Masaru AU - Hayashi, Yoshi-Yuki AU - Kashimura, Hiroki AU - Sugiyama, Ko-ichiro AU - Sakanoi, Takeshi AU - Ando, Hiroki AU - Murakami, Shin-ya AU - Sato, Takao M. AU - Takagi, Seiko AU - Nakajima, Kensuke AU - Peralta, Javier AU - Lee, Yeon Joo AU - Nakatsuka, Junichi AU - Ichikawa, Tsutomu AU - Inoue, Kozaburo AU - Toda, Tomoaki AU - Toyota, Hiroyuki AU - Tachikawa, Sumitaka AU - Narita, Shinichiro AU - Hayashiyama, Tomoko AU - Hasegawa, Akiko AU - Kamata, Yukio PY - 2016 DA - 2016/05/06 TI - AKATSUKI returns to Venus JO - Earth, Planets and Space SP - 75 VL - 68 IS - 1 AB - AKATSUKI is the Japanese Venus Climate Orbiter that was designed to investigate the climate system of Venus. The orbiter was launched on May 21, 2010, and it reached Venus on December 7, 2010. Thrust was applied by the orbital maneuver engine in an attempt to put AKATSUKI into a westward equatorial orbit around Venus with a 30-h orbital period. However, this operation failed because of a malfunction in the propulsion system. After this failure, the spacecraft orbited the Sun for 5 years. On December 7, 2015, AKATSUKI once again approached Venus and the Venus orbit insertion was successful, whereby a westward equatorial orbit with apoapsis of ~440,000 km and orbital period of 14 days was initiated. Now that AKATSUKI’s long journey to Venus has ended, it will provide scientific data on the Venusian climate system for two or more years. For the purpose of both decreasing the apoapsis altitude and avoiding a long eclipse during the orbit, a trim maneuver was performed at the first periapsis. The apoapsis altitude is now ~360,000 km with a periapsis altitude of 1000–8000 km, and the period is 10 days and 12 h. In this paper, we describe the details of the Venus orbit insertion-revenge 1 (VOI-R1) and the new orbit, the expected scientific information to be obtained at this orbit, and the Venus images captured by the onboard 1-µm infrared camera, ultraviolet imager, and long-wave infrared camera 2 h after the successful initiation of the VOI-R1. SN - 1880-5981 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s40623-016-0457-6 DO - 10.1186/s40623-016-0457-6 ID - Nakamura2016 ER -