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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Apr 21 2005, 09:51 AM
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4405 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
Hard to tell. It is sort of like Pre-Cassini Titan, in that the limiting factor in all images we have is the resolution of the detector, so we don't know just how well we will be able to see. I will research this a bit more and see if I can dig up any speculation. Still, if Venus Express can take images at Cassini/ISS Titan resolution, they will look even more spectacular, because Venus is so much larger. And at last we will have some global multispectral data (although some data to this effect has been assembled from different Radar systems (PVO, Magellen, Venera, and the earthbased collection).
Anyhow, it seems the VMC, while it is a clone of the "Beaglecam" on Mars Express, seems to be hav converted in to quite a good little science instrument. Here is the info from the regular Venus Express website: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...bodylongid=1448 -------------------- |
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Guest_Richard Trigaux_* |
Jun 26 2005, 08:06 AM
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Guests |
QUOTE (tedstryk @ Apr 21 2005, 09:51 AM) It is sort of like Pre-Cassini Titan, in that the limiting factor in all images we have is the resolution of the detector, so we don't know just how well we will be able to see. I think the main limiting factor in Cassini was not the instruments themselves, but the radio bandwidth available, together with very brief observation opportunities. This was all the more true for Huygens, which images were ridiculously small and tremendously compressed. With Venus we have more solar power, and a much shortest distance. And, in orbit, we have the possiblity to take hundreds of images of the same surface part, and so to statistically eliminate the effects of cloud features. |
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