Venus Express Options

[cndwrld]

VEX Image as Astronomy Photo of the Day

VEX image of Venus made the Astronomy Picture Of the Day today, on 26 Feb 08.

You can see it at:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080226.html

It was taken by the VEX camera in the UV. The photo is titled, "Mysterious Acid Haze", which sounds like a good name for a rock band.

[scalbers]

Here are some interesting Venus Express results as discussed in another forum:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...eiled/#more-538

[cndwrld]

Venus Express: Venus Express to fly closer to Venus

A series of orbit control manoeuvres (OCMs) is underway to alter the orbit of the Venus Express spacecraft with the goal of reducing the pericentre altitude to 185 km. These manoeuvres which began on 13 July provide new opportunities for scientific observations of regions which have not been probed by the spacecraft so far.

http://sci.esa.int/jump.cfm?oid=43110

- The article might make it a bit confusing. But this is not just a pericenter lowering, but also an apocenter raising. In other words, shifting the entire orbit 'down', but maintaining the 24 hour period. The period is critical to keep the cost down by having downlinks at Cebreros during normal working hours.

The first burns have gone very well. If they continue to be as accurate, the science that is scheduled around the burns should be uneffected because it was planned with the target altitudes in mind.

[cndwrld]

ESA Bulletin Features VEX

The new issue of the ESA Bulletin is now available on-line at:
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMDIT6UWJF_index_0.html

This month, the cover article is about the VEX results so far, as explained by the Project Scientist, Håkan Svedham.

[JRehling]

Cool article. It presents a lot of stuff that's otherwise been presented in harder-to-understand journal articles. I hope this reaches a lot of interested eyeballs.

[ngunn]

Well it reached mine - much appreciated.

[cndwrld]

Some VEX data should finally be made available in the near future. I'll post it here when I get more information.

[peter59]

Two days after releasing Venus Express VMC data, and no one comment. Why ?

Planetary Science Archive Dataset Browser

[tedstryk]

I had no idea it had been released! Sweet!

[tedstryk]

I should add that all this data (first the VMC on Mars Express, now this) is a European conspiracy to make me lose my job (I am, after all, supposed to be preparing for the start of classes on Monday. What next, Rosetta Mars images?

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This looks great - lots and lots of images. I have downloaded only a few 'samples' and still haven't started digesting all of this properly. Here is a typical UV image (there are images from other filters as well):



No processing except for a contrast stretch. There are lots of images like this one so it's probably possible to construct a Venus atmospheric movie. I'm not 100% sure though because as previosuly noted I have downloaded only a few 'samples' but this seems pretty likely.

There should also be images at closer range so maybe there's enough there to enable me to construct a global cylindrical map. However, I haven't downloaded/found any of these yet.

VEX SPICE kernels seem to have become available at the PDS NAIF node at the same time these images were released and there are some INDEX.TAB files as well. What this means is that viewing geometry information is available for the images.

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This is a really interesting dataset of about 20,000 images. I don't find Venus less interesting than e.g. Mars. It's just harder to explore but it has a complex and interesting atmosphere and it's gelogically interesting as well.

Here are two more samples, both obtained through the UV filter:






The spacecraft's altitude is 32000 and 8900 km, respectively.

I'm not sure why the image area has this weird shape (all of the images are like this); I'm just beginning to 'digest' this dataset.

[ugordan]

I'm not sure why the image area has this weird shape (all of the images are like this);

The reason for this can be found in the documentation directory of the volumes. In short, instead of having a filter wheel (and so moving parts), it has four different objectives, each projecting an image onto the same CCD. The objectives' FOVs are roughly spherical and hence this weird shape.

[JRehling]

Great stuff, guys -- I appreciate it.

Yeah, Venus is tough to explore on the surface, but VEx is way up above all that mess. From up there, it's just a pretty, detailed, constantly changing atmosphere day (UV) and night (IR).

[SpaceListener]

Thanks for posting a good picture

An interesting comment about the Venus' clouds is that it has nothing similar to ones of Earth with many curls, disperse and only white clouds of Earth. The Venusian clouds covers totally the land...How dark would be on the surface during the day? I suppose that the surface might have very light day during the day with almost 25 km thick of clouds between 50 - 75 km above of the surface. The other interesting aspect is that the Venusian clouds looks very well combed against the Earth's ones with curler clouds. That observation is that indeed that the Venusian winds blows with a fierce speed at a rate of 300 km/h,