Venture 4 Flies High, Falls Short

Y1:D39 – Today’s Venture 4 launch went without incident as its Chryslus rocket lifted its tiny conical payload toward the Mün. With a liftoff time of 5:33:54, the probe headed toward its destination as planned, the probe it’s self however did not perform as planned.

As the probe approached its closest point to the Mün, ground controllers sent commands to wake the probe up in order to take a photograph and collect other scientific data. The probe appeared to respond as designed, however when the command was sent to transmit the data it suddenly went dead.

Mission control only received an unusable fragment of data. All subsequent attempts to contact the probe have failed. Optical tracking indicates it is presently headed into interplanetary space, joining Avant-Garde which preceded it earlier this month.