Europe's mission to Venus is no longer in any doubt. On 5 November, the European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed that Venus Express, scheduled for launch in 2005, will go ahead.

The mission to Earth's hotter neighbour was cancelled in May because of funding delays (see Nature 417, 474; 2002), but the decision caused such alarm in the space-science community that the agency rethought its plans. In July, ESA began work on the design phase of the mission, in anticipation of this month's final approval.

The fate of Venus Express had been in doubt because Italy could not finance one of the mission's most important instruments, the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS), being developed at the Institute for Space Astrophysics in Rome. This instrument will detect the low levels of near-infrared radiation that escape Venus's thick atmosphere, and so allow scientists to study the composition of the planet's lower atmosphere.

ESA has now agreed to cover the costs of integrating the instrument into the spacecraft, even though it normally expects national space agencies to pay for scientific instruments. In return, ESA will publish a call for researchers from other member states to join the VIRTIS team.

“VIRTIS is a crucial instrument for the mission, and that's why we fought so hard for it,” says a relieved Dmitri Titov, the mission's principal investigator, who is based at the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Lindau, Germany.

But other projects were not so fortunate. DIVA, a planned German astrometry satellite to measure the position and movements of 35 million stars in the Milky Way, and planned for a 2004 launch, now looks unlikely to take off.

Germany had asked ESA to help close a 15-million-euro (US$15.2-million) funding gap. But the agency's scientific advisers said that participation in DIVA could distract European astrometrists from ESA's cornerstone astrometry mission, GAIA, scheduled for launch in 2012.

Siegfried Röser, DIVA's principal investigator and a senior scientist at the Astronomisches Rechen Institute in Heidelberg, argues that DIVA would have been “an ideal precursor for GAIA in testing technology”. But unless NASA accepts a proposal currently being considered by the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC for a US–German partnership on the mission, the ESA decision is the death knell for DIVA.