Venus Express |
Venus Express |
Apr 12 2005, 06:56 PM
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4405 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
If all goes well, Venus Express will be a major topic for discussion in this forum a year from now. Does anyone know how good the surface coverage will be from VIRTIS and VMC? My understanding is that VIRTIS will obtain low resolution multispectral maps, and that VMC will, in addition to cloud monitoring, have one channel that can see the surface, but I don't know at what resolution or at what quality. It will be nice to have some non-radar images of Venus' surface besides the Venera snapshots and the shadowy images from Earth and Galileo's NIMS.
Ted -------------------- |
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Jun 26 2005, 07:02 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
My understanding is that the topographically related infrared brightness variations seen by Galileo at Venus were diffused through the lower atmosphere and then the dense middle cloud deck.
VIMS' middle infrared visibility of Titan's surface is quite good, compared with poor visibility and high amounts of diffuse scattering of reflected light in the 1 micrometer 'window" as seen by the Cassini imaging system. My understanding is that at Venus, the atmosphere has no non-scattering transmission till you reach microwave wavelengths. Basically, imagine holding a sheet of blotchy waxed paper 50 km above the planet's surface and examining the diffuse patterns on the waxed paper from variable amounts and colors <spectral emissivity variations> of the surface below. The blotches will be constantly varying with time and location, but the color and brightnesses of the glow from beneath will be constant, and the color especially, can be separated from the blotchy cloud patterns <which themselves are interesting> |
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