Akatsuki, launched in May 2010, was designed to study the atmosphere around Venus, which rotates much faster than the planetary surface underneath. But when the spacecraft attempted to ignite its main engine and enter the planet’s orbit, things went wrong. Salt had accumulated in a valve between a tank of pressurized helium and a fuel tank, cutting off the flow of fuel to the main engine, and causing a nozzle in the propulsion system to break. So instead of putting itself on a path around Venus, the craft went spinning around the Sun.

Since then, engineers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have been figuring out ways to recover the mission. The agency had to wait five years for Akatsuki to orbit the Sun and catch up with Venus again, and it also needed an alternative way to propel the spacecraft into the planet’s orbit. The main engine was dead, so Jaxa dumped more than 140 pounds of its fuel into space to make the craft easier to maneuver. As an alternative the engineers turned to the spacecraft’s thrusters — small engines on the probe normally used to make adjustments in position. JAXA ignited four of the eight thrusters on Akatsuki for about 20 minutes to get the craft into an elliptical orbit around the planet.