Bright spot on Venus Options

[Juramike]

space.com story on mysterious cloud brightening on Venus:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0907...right-spot.html


...also spotted by an amateur astronomer.

[cndwrld]

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.

[imipak]

In defence of ESA: the Saturn system, and Mars, are very different targets from Venus. The former change their appearance on very short time scales, and fairly frequently. Venus, as far as I know, does not. Unless I'm mistaken*, events like this are rare, which is why this event is news. Why would you design your spacecraft, and it's ops processes, around a rare event that might never happen during it's operational lifetime?

I second Stu's thanks to cndwrld for giving an inside perspective. We all understand money's as tight at ESA as everywhere else.

I think the contact point between the two perspectives surfaces here:

The raw data comes down within about 18 hours of taking it. [...] Then the images need to be calibrated. And then it takes time for people to figure out what is going on.

Why is it necessary for images to be calibrated and "figured out" before they are released?

(* include std.disclaimer. Cluestick welcome here .)