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Report for Period 20 December to 26 December 2009

The Venus Express spacecraft and instruments performed nominally during the reporting period. This week's activities focussed on performing the last science operations before Venus Express operations enter the solar conjunction phase on 29 December. All commands related to autonomous operations for the forthcoming solar conjunction phase were uplinked to the spacecraft on 25 December (DOY 359).

Report for Period 28 November to 25 December 2009

The reporting period covers four weeks of nominal operations for the Rosetta spacecraft. Following the successful completion of the mission's last Earth swingby in the previous reporting period, all instruments are currently switched off. The spacecraft is now cruising towards asteroid Lutetia. Several activities required for the refresh of all spacecraft Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROMs) were conducted during the reporting period.

Report for Period 13 December to 19 December 2009

The Venus Express spacecraft and instruments performed nominally during this week. The mission planning activities were focussed on the planning for the next two weeks leading up to the solar conjunction period, and for the conjunction period itself, which runs from 29 December 2009 to 22 January 2010.

Report for Period 6 December to 12 December 2009

The Venus Express spacecraft and instruments performed nominally during this week. A pre-solar conjunction test was successfully performed at Cebreros on DOY 343. The outcome of the test was the final ground station configuration set-up that will be used during the upcoming phase of Venus Express superior conjunction operations. These operations will cover a period of about three weeks around the superior conjunction of Venus on 11 January 2010.

Report for period 17 November to 7 December 2009

Mission operations of the Herschel space observatory continued nominally during the reporting period, with the spacecraft and subsystems all performing as expected. Following the formal approval of the HIFI recovery plan on 25 November, its implementation is well underway, with the complete switch on of HIFI expected in January 2010.

Report for Period 29 November to 5 December 2009

The Venus Express spacecraft and instruments performed nominally during this week. Strong rain at the site of the Cebreros ground station on 29 November temporarily affected the downlink. Part of the data originally planned to be transmitted to Earth was stored aboard Venus Express and successfully retrieved two days later.

Main events and activities

On 10 November the eighth Mars Express eclipse season started, which will last until 19 April 2010. The eighth Mars Express occultation season has been running already since 20 September and will continue until 15 August 2010.

Report for Period 22 November to 28 November 2009

The Venus Express spacecraft and instruments performed nominally during this week.

Report for Period 14 November to 27 November 2009

The reporting period covers the first two weeks after Rosetta's third Earth swingby. The scientific observations linked to the Earth swingby phase were concluded successfully. Fine orbit determination computations were conducted after the Earth swingby to verify Rosetta was on the desired outbound trajectory. These indicated that a clean-up trajectory correction manoeuvre (TCM) was necessary to correct for a small inaccuracy. The clean-up TCM, with a delta-V of about 58 cm/s, was successfully performed on 23 November.