Venus Express |
Venus Express |
Apr 12 2005, 06:56 PM
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4404 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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Mar 26 2007, 07:38 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 247 Joined: 17-February 07 From: ESAC, cerca Madrid, Spain. Member No.: 1743 |
VEX Mission Ops Reporting, 11 - 17 March
At the end of the last CEB pass in the reporting period (DOY 076, 18:00z) Venus Express was orbiting Venus at 195 million km from the Earth. The one-way signal travel time was 652 sec. The Attitude and Orbit Control System (AOCS), power, thermal, mechanisms and fuel system continue to operate extremely well. Continued kudos to Astrium, and the flight control team at ESOC. We did not receive a small amount of science data last week, because high winds at the Cebreros ground station required the antenna to be safed. That data was stored on board, and has now been downlinked. The data is transferred from Cebreros to a server at ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany. Our science teams pull their data off of that, knowing that the data is not final for at least a week or two after the actual downlink, just for such occurences. This recent data delay will not cause any problems. The Cebreros station is new, the schedule being driven primarily by VEX support requirements; it still has that new ground station smell. There are occasional problems with equipment or procedures, but just the usual small stuff one would expect. VIRTIS movie passes are scheduled for the second week of April (DOY 98-101). This includes five orbits, where the mission constraints allow us to take extended mosaic images of the south pole from apocenter. Planning of science operations during this event is now finished. A proficiency pass is scheduled on DOY 078 with DSS-63 (Madrid 70-m DSN antenna) to test system readiness for this activity. Being able to use the DSN 70-meter antenna means that it greatlly increases our data rate. Using the DSN station in Madrid, located in the 'same' spot as the Cebreros antenna, means that we do not need to make any changes in our usual orbit timing; we'll be downlinking at the same time as we would have if we had used the Cebreros station. We have made regular but limited use of the DSN stations; in the past, it was only for radio science observations. NASA has been very helpful in this regard; ESA isn't charged for the time, but on the other hand we get whatever time is left over. We put in requests; if no one else needs that antenna at that time, they give it to us. We are always in a position to get bumped, but it hasn't happened yet. So it is great that we get the time, as ESA doesn't yet have any 70-meter dishes. The science planning for the 14th month of operations (MTP014) has been completed, and final checks are to be done shortly at ESOC in Darmstadt. The science planning for MTP015 has also been completed. Spacecraft pointing requests have been approved by Flight Dynamics, and the flight control team received the instrument commanding files last Thursday for their final checks. I sure hope they work. This set covers the second half of our quadrature period, and the special and special Messenger Fly-By support observations. We've been so busy, time has flown by. But 11 April 2006 was the day we got to Venus, so our first anniversary of Venus operations is almost here. Cheers- Don -------------------- --
cndwrld@yahoo.com |
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