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.

[dvandorn]

Ummm... let me get this straight. VEX ops are pre-planned four months in advance and nothing can be changed in those pre-planned ops plans? So that any follow-up on transient phenomena literally cannot take place for at least four months?

If that's the case, then we truly don't have a resource at Venus that can do anything at any given time except its pre-planned program, which will always be a good four months out of date. I guess we can take "respond to transient phenomena or rapid changes in environment" off the list of VEX's abilities. (I know, it's never been a claim of the project.... but, as Doug says, the whole thing gives me rage.)

But, to be fair... with what do I compare this? Can Cassini's op executions be changed after they are loaded into the spacecraft? If so, how quickly? How fast can Cassini respond to some changing circumstance? How about Hubble? We know Hubble had been packed solid with use requests and that it was still capable of being re-tasked to get Jupiter images within a week of the first detection of the impact on old Jove.

Maybe we're all just too used to ops plans like those for the MERs, where what we do tomorrow is highly impacted by what happened today. Obviously, many NASA probes (especially those in the outer system) don't have that kind of operational flexibility, either. So... how does VEX compare to other planetary probes in terms of being re-tasked?

-the other Doug

[cndwrld]

Ummm... let me get this straight. VEX ops are pre-planned four months in advance and nothing can be changed in those pre-planned ops plans? So that any follow-up on transient phenomena literally cannot take place for at least four months?

If that's the case, then we truly don't have a resource at Venus that can do anything at any given time except its pre-planned program, which will always be a good four months out of date. I guess we can take "respond to transient phenomena or rapid changes in environment" off the list of VEX's abilities. (I know, it's never been a claim of the project.... but, as Doug says, the whole thing gives me rage.)

But, to be fair... with what do I compare this? Can Cassini's op executions be changed after they are loaded into the spacecraft? If so, how quickly? How fast can Cassini respond to some changing circumstance? How about Hubble? We know Hubble had been packed solid with use requests and that it was still capable of being re-tasked to get Jupiter images within a week of the first detection of the impact on old Jove.

Maybe we're all just too used to ops plans like those for the MERs, where what we do tomorrow is highly impacted by what happened today. Obviously, many NASA probes (especially those in the outer system) don't have that kind of operational flexibility, either. So... how does VEX compare to other planetary probes in terms of being re-tasked?

-the other Doug

Any other questions?