Venus Express: One Year in Orbit, Symposium at the 2007 EGU General Assembly Options

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Forwarding an email that was sent out today by Dmitri Titov, Venus Express PI. Cross reference with this UMSF thread.

Dear Colleagues,

the General Assembly of the European Geophysical Union (EGU) will be held on April 15-20, 2007 in Vienna, Austria. The Symposium PS 2.1 "Venus Express: one year in orbit", included in the science Programme, will be focused on presentation and discussion of the results obtained during the first year of the orbital mission. Please find the description of the Symposium at the end of the e-mail and visit the EGU Web site: http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2007/ for more details about the Assembly.

We would like to encourage you to take part in the Symposium and to submit contributed abstracts. Please note that the deadline for abstracts submission is January 15, 2007.

Best regards

Dima Titov and Hakan Svedhem,
The Conveners
_________________________________________________
On April 11, 2006 Venus Express-the first European satellite at Venus- was inserted in orbit around the planet and began collecting data. The results of the first year of observations will be presented at the Symposium. The Programme will consist of solicited talks focused on the Venus Express observations and contributed presentations of the preliminary data analysis. The contributions related to the physics of Venus atmosphere, its plasma environment and the surface and based on the analysis of the data from Venus Express and earlier missions, theoretical studies and numerical modelling are highly welcome. Perspectives of the future Venus exploration will be discussed.

Convener : D. Titov (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany) Co-convener : H. Svedhem (ESA/ESTEC, The Netherlands)

[J.J.]

I agree with others who say that the differences between ESA and NASA come down to two different academic cultures. Americans like to know where their money is going, and like to be dazzled--and indeed, many of our space projects over the last 30 years have leaned toward those end, along with the requisite data mining and number-crunching. I'm sure that if, say, HST had been launched with no capacity for images--e.g., with only spectrographs and photometers--that it would have been round-filed over the Pacific a long time ago. I can't say too much about ESA without more experience, but from what I've seen so far, the clearest explanation I can muster for the differences is the aforementioned cultural one.

Needless to say, this is one *major* reason why I want to see our Kepler, SIM, and TPF go up, even though ESA has versions of its own on the books. I know that ESA won't keep the lid on a major exoplanet discovery--but I also know that they'll be less forthcoming about all such data whether it relates to exoplanets or not.

To be fair, I thoroughly applaud the accomplishments of ESA over the past two decades--Giotto, Huygens, MEx etc. are magnificent achievements that I feel everyone can be proud of--but I also feel, as apparently do many others on this board, that more publicity stunts on ESA's part would definitely be a good thing.

[Bob Shaw]

To be fair, I thoroughly applaud the accomplishments of ESA over the past two decades--Giotto, Huygens, MEx etc. are magnificent achievements that I feel everyone can be proud of--but I also feel, as apparently do many others on this board, that more publicity stunts on ESA's part would definitely be a good thing.

I don't especially want stunts - but I *would* like to see some content. Doug's comments above seem perfectly reasonable to me - I really don't want the gee-whiz-prettified-to-death-and-beyond images, I want the meat... ...and I'd like it on the table before it decides to evolve into something else and fly away.


Bob Shaw