A new attitude pointing design for Venus spacecraft

For Venus exploration, a Venus spacecraft is expected to keep its digital transmission antenna pointing towards the Earth for ultra-long-distance and low-bit-rate transmission. Fixed heat-dispersing surfaces are also expected to maintain the temperature inside the spacecraft, which is closer to the Sun than the Earthʹs orbiter. This paper addresses a new attitude pointing design scheme for Venus spacecraft just by placing the antenna irregularly on the spacecraft, which is beneficial to transmitting data from Venus to Earth and holding the temperature against the Sun. Unlike other Venus spacecrafts employing two or three antennas to transmitting data, such as Venus Express (ESA) and AKATSUKI (JAXA), the present scheme aims to reduce the number of transmission antennas to only one and to set the fixed surfaces as thermal radiators. Two detailed strategies during the flight operation are proposed in this paper to drive the attitude manoeuvres to keep the only antenna pointing to the Earth all the time and to switch the radiator to the suitable surface in specified intervals.