The European Space Agency probe to Venus, based on the same design as ESA's earlier Mars Express spacecraft. Venus Express was launched in November 2005 and arrived at Venus in April 2006. It went into a highly elliptical polar orbit, ranging between 250 km and 66 000 km from Venus, from which it studied the planet's atmosphere and surface for a planned 500 Earth days (about two Venusian years). The Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) imaged the planet's clouds at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, while other instruments plumbed the atmosphere to elucidate its structure, circulation, and interaction with the surface. The craft spent eight years exploring the planet from orbit, vastly outliving the mission's planned duration, before running out of fuel. The probe then began its descent, dipping further and further into Venus's atmosphere, before the mission lost contact with Earth (November 2014) and officially ended (December 2014). Before it burned up, it sent back data that revealed the atmosphere to be rippling with atmospheric waves, and, at an average temperature of –157° C it is colder than anywhere on Earth. Scientists continue to sift through the probe’s data, finding, for instance, how weather patterns seen in Venus’s thick cloud layers are directly linked to the topography of the surface below and that the atmosphere on that planet’s night side behaves very differently to that of its dayside.