The Japanese Venus orbiter Akatsuki means “Dawn” in English.
The name Akatsuki is a Japanese word associated with dawn or daybreak, an evocative choice for a spacecraft designed to study Venus’s atmosphere and weather. The mission was also known as the Venus Climate Orbiter and PLANET-C, and it was operated by Japan’s space agency, JAXA.
Akatsuki launched on 20 May 2010. Its first attempt to enter Venus orbit failed in December that year after a problem with the spacecraft’s main engine. Rather than abandoning the mission, engineers used the probe’s attitude-control thrusters to make a second orbital-insertion attempt when it returned to Venus five years later.
The recovery succeeded on 7 December 2015, making Akatsuki Japan’s first spacecraft to orbit Venus. Its cameras observed cloud patterns, atmospheric circulation, and the planet’s rapid atmospheric super-rotation. The name is sometimes confused with descriptions of Venus as the “morning star” or “evening star,” but those are observational nicknames for Venus, not the translation of Akatsuki.