Hi guys,

In only 21 days we will have the orbit insertion of this great spacecraft:

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=64

Venus Express is a follow on from the Mars Express mission. Many of the instruments on the mission are simply upgraded versions of those on the Mars Express platform. After a 153 day cruise to Venus the spacecraft will enter Venusian orbit in April 2006.

I hope the mission will be successful and we can start to investigate Venus as exhaustive as we do in Mars...

Me too, especially because I'll be in Darmstadt to watch! We are LONG overdue for a followup mission to Venus.

--Emily

Pardon me for this, Alex, but there is already a forum devoted to Venus Express:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showforum=32

But I certainly understand your excitement. Perhaps we will finally learn for
certain if Venus produces lightning or not. And if that sudden burst of sulfur
dioxide detected by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter (PVO) was due to volcanic
activity or something else.

And just what was that sudden increase in infrared radiation detected by all
the Pioneer Venus drop probes before their sensors were overloaded?

Just out of curiosity, are you going to be in Darmstadt to watch orbital insertion or during some other time frame?

But we will probably want a discussion to talk about its arrival! Those kinds of events usually generate a lot of posts with more excitement than substance Probably wouldn't hurt to subtitle this discussion "Orbit insertion 11 April 2006, 08:32:47 UT"


Indeed yes I'll be there for the arrival. I'm going there in order to accompany the winner of the Postcards from Venus contest, but I'll also be witnessing all of the fun stuff associated with the arrival. It won't be as dramatic as Huygens was by a long shot but it'll still be exciting.

--Emily

Yes, sure no problem, I am new here and just discovered this forum (which is great!)

Certainly I am excited, I can't wait to have Venus charted, just like Mars...

And luckily, in a couple of years, we will also have Google Venus!

Why can't we have it now? Magellan did a pretty good job as I recall.

With no radar on Venus Express, we shouldn't expect any surface mapping in any way that would improve upon (or even come close to matching) the resolution of existing maps.

I have a Venus globe on my desk. Magellan data is all that is needed (save for the gaps in coverage) for that level of resolution. Better resolution is going to have to wait for another, better radar mapper or some colossal effort from an armada of subcloud aerobots.

It's true that Venus Express won't outdo Magellan for resolution. It'll be like the difference between Cassini VIMS and RADAR at Titan -- the radar images are certainly easier to interpret geologically. But they're like an X-ray; they're a way of seeing that has nothing whatever to do with how the human eye sees things. Even though VIMS and even ISS images can be tough to interpret at Titan, at least they tell us reasonably truthfully what would probably look bright and dark to our eyes. VIRTIS will show us Venus' surface in a new way. Whether they'll be able to correct for all those atmospheric effects well enough to even begin to approximate how the human eye would percieve an airless Venus globe I couldn't predict, but it'll be interesting to watch them try. For example, I wonder if any of those volcanic flows on Venus really look any different to one another in visible or near-IR wavelengths, or if they're all just identical black black black basalt.

--Emily

I would be very glad if that you stay at Darmstadt and provide us a much faster and better news coverage than does the ESA P.R.

Rodolfo

A few years, maybe, but Google is apparently planning for the future today :

"Google has now plans to create similar sites for other major planets for which information is available. It has obtained domain names like Google Mercury, Google Venus and Google Jupiter."

No planet is safe!

The PFS failed before

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM6N9638FE_index_0.html

On Mars it had a spatial resolution ranging from 7 to 12 kilometres when the Redplanet was observed from an altitude of 250 kilometres.