Bright spot on Venus |
Bright spot on Venus |
Jul 30 2009, 09:33 PM
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 2785 Joined: 10-November 06 From: Pasadena, CA Member No.: 1345 |
space.com story on mysterious cloud brightening on Venus:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0907...right-spot.html ...also spotted by an amateur astronomer. -------------------- Some higher resolution images available at my photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/
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Aug 4 2009, 02:25 PM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 247 Joined: 17-February 07 From: ESAC, cerca Madrid, Spain. Member No.: 1743 |
To give people some idea of what to expect, a few thoughts on the process on Venus Express. The raw data comes down within about 18 hours of taking it. But sometimes bits and pieces will come down later; whether some data for an orbit comes down immediately, or parts of it come down a little later, depends on the circumstances (how much was taken, what our data rate is at the time, how much ground system time we have for the dump, etc). But I think all the bright spot data is down now. Then the images need to be calibrated. And then it takes time for people to figure out what is going on. The VMC (Venus Monitoring Camera) team consists of three people, so we're not talking about mobilizing big teams of people. They've begun talking to the Virtis team about cross-referencing their data sets, as the Virtis spectrometer probably covered it, too, at least partially. Since the pointing and commanding files are made four months in advance, we can't just drop what is planned and swing around and start taking new observations that aren't previously planned. So we'll have to see what we got. Then the teams are going to try to coordinate and see what they have jointly. And since they didn't plan on this spot being there, they'll have to determine what they can figure out from the originally planned observations.
In our planning, we plan one month for one month of observations, four months in advance. Two times per year, we 'double plan' two one-month periods at the same time, so that we have two periods of four weeks when there is no planning work done: around Christmas, and in late July/early August, to allow for extended holiday periods. Right now, a lot of the instrument teams are on summer holiday, so less will be getting done now until everyone ramps back up at the end of August. So everyone on VEX is pretty excited to see what is going on. But nothing is going to be happening immediately. -------------------- --
cndwrld@yahoo.com |
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