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Japanese Space Probe Akatsuki Enters Orbit Around Venus Five Years Late (space.com)
MarkWhittington writes: On May 17, 2010, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency Venus Climate Orbiter probe or as it is now called Akatsuki lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center. It was supposed to enter orbit around Venus on December 6, 2010. However, due to a failure in the probe's orbital maneuvering thruster, Akatsuki did not enter Venus orbit and went into orbit around the sun instead. According to a story on Space.com, just about five years to the day of the failure, Akatsuki assumed an orbit around the second planet from the sun. Japanese scientists will determine what sort of orbit that is in a couple of days and, hopefully, begin the probe's science mission.
Must be nice to be able to show up five years late and still have a job.
The impressive thing here is that the thruster is still non-operational, so it wasn't just a matter of waiting 5 years to try again. Instead they're using the RCS system, a low-efficiency thruster which was only meant for steering, to perform orbital injection. Reportedly, this is the first time that's been done for a planetary transfer, and should hopefully let them salvage the science mission which was initially thought to be lost (remains to be seen if the science equipment is still working).
They can do this attempt because when the original orbit insertion failed, Akatsuki entered a heliocentric orbit in an 8:9 orbital resonance with Venus, making sure it'd meet up with Venus eventually. I haven't been able to find if that was a happy coincidence or if the initial approach to Venus was designed for this contingency.