1956 late August, Illyrien Space Center, Press Office
Venus update from the ISP. Earlier this months, two probes, launched earlier this year finally arrived at the sister planet. A third was lost in space, when it ran out of hydrazine and was unable to ignite its engines.
Gene Kerman has declared the Venus missions a collective success, and has commented that one of the probes managed to get into a low polar orbit, so that we can now start to learn more about this mysterious planet.
Camera data is still incoming, and being processed, but we cannot seem to see any surface features, leading our scientist to conclude that either the camera is damaged or the surface is hidden behind a thick atmosphere. Further updates regarding this, as conclusions are reached.
The first probe, henceforth renamed the Venus Orbiter 1, arrived at the very edge of the Venus SOI and barely managed to slow down sufficiently to get into a very high orbit.
The second probe, henceforth renamed the Venus Orbital Scanner, passed Venus at about 17k km altitude and, with a minimal burn, managed to get into a highly ecliptic orbit.Further corrective burns lowed that altitude to less then a thousand, which should allow for radar scanning of the planet.
With the lessons gained from these results, course corrections where sent to two Mars probes, to try to replicate this situations.
Illyrien Space Program 
Well you finally got to Venus, good for you š
I got there so early that I didn’t have the tech to neither make orbit nor scan the place. New mission will be reported in November (I may have noted the date wrong what with being so far ahead of you :-P), where I have another engineering meeting >_<
The trick of sending 3 probes to make room for failures seems to have some merit though, when in doubt – go for overkill š
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There is no such thing as overkill š I actually went for maximum dV, which was lucky, since I lost so much in adjustments.. next time š
My future interplanetary missions are going to midcourse adjusted to get periapsis at 10.000km or lower. I was extremely surprised how effective that was. I think I payed about 680 dV to get into orbit, and about 280 to adjust it to a close polar orbit… well you learn something every mission š Once I get my Mars probes as well. I will write an engineering meeting about this, and some other suggestions for future missions. I got a few of those.
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