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500 Days At Venus, And The Surprises Keep Coming
Paris, France (SPX) Sep 04, 2007 Venus Express has now orbited Earth's twin for 500 Earth days, completing as many orbits. While the satellite maintains steady and excellent performance, the planet continues to surprise and amaze us. In spite of experiencing a challenging environment, Venus Express is in an excellent condition. It receives four times the amount of solar radiation as compared to its sister spacecraft, Mars Express, but modifications to the spacecraft design have workedjust as intended and operation has been very stable. Many different activities transpire on board with each orbit: instruments are switched on and off, they change modes and targets and the spacecraft checks out and monitors its subsystems more or less continuously. The few anomalies that occurred were quickly resolved by vigilant spacecraft controllers. An impressive amount of data - about 1 Terabits, or one million million bits - has been transmitted to Earth over the first 500 days. Hakan Svedhem, Venus Express Project Scientist says, "The scientists analysing the data have a challenging but exciting task ahead." They will have to archive the data and extract the most important detail from this immense collection of images, spectra and profiles of temperature, pressure and chemical composition. Some of the first detailed analyses are now being completed and will soon be published in acclaimed scientific journals. Among many other findings that have surprised scientists, Venus' atmosphere seems extremely fickle. Recent observations with the Visible and Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIRTIS), the atmospheric structure changes quite rapidly, from day to day. Giuseppe Piccioni, co-Principal Investigator for VIRTIS on board Venus Express says, "It seems that the mid latitudes form a sort of transition region with mostly laminar flow. Moving equatorward, there is more convective flow in the atmosphere, whereas the polar region is dominated by huge vortices." The meteorology of the planet, including its deep atmosphere is highly variable. "Although the configuration of the flow is similar, the intensity of turbulence changes significantly from one orbit to the next," adds Pierre Drossart, co-Principal Investigator for VIRTIS. The polar region or the 'black hole' seen in the images is where the polar dipole dominates. The polar dipole is the name given to a giant double-vortex, each of which is about 2000 km across, similar to the eye of a hurricane. The double-vortex has been seen at both, the north and south poles, rotating in opposite directions (clockwise at the north pole and counter-clockwise at the south pole). Observations with Venus Express show that the vortex at the south pole also changes its shape rapidly, from one orbit to the next. Community Email This Article Comment On This Article Related Links Venus Express Venus Express News and Venusian Science
Up Up And Away To Venus
Pasadena CA (SPX) Aug 28, 2007Scientists hope to learn more about climate changes here on Earth by studying Venus. A prototype balloon could eventually study the planet's surface and examine its atmosphere and the bizarre winds and chemistry within it. A team of JPL, ILC Dover and NASA Wallops Flight Facility engineers designed, fabricated and tested the balloon. |
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