Venus Express - the ESA mission to Venus

[parallaxicality]

Call me when they figure out what ashen light is.

[Spacemad]

The upcoming planetary encounter also offers a variety of opportunities for making new observations of Venus’ atmosphere and cloud structure, space environment, and, perhaps even the surface. All of the MESSENGER instruments will be trained on Venus during the encounter.

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_roo..._04_02_07.html

I believe this may answer your question!

[01101001]

ESA Venus Express News: Venus Express’ infrared camera goes filming

An exciting new series of videos from ESA’s Venus Express has been capturing atmospheric details of day and night areas simultaneously, at different altitudes.

The south pole of the planet and its gigantic double vortex has been pictured as never before.

The south pole of Venus and the double-eyed storm permanently rule atmospheric phenomena in that area of the planet. They are key to understanding the global atmospheric dynamics on Venus and will contribute to a better comprehension of the global meteorology of the planet.

[Blob]

Data from Venus Express, which has been revealing new and crucial details about our closest planetary neighbour, will now be augmented by synoptic data from a coordinated ground-based observation campaign.
This campaign will contribute to the growing body of information on the nature of Venus’s atmosphere and will help put the spacecraft’s observations into a broader context.

Read more

[Launch window]

Venus Express and MESSENGER to look at Venus in tandem
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMMC0ARR1F_index_0.html
4 June 2007
On 6 June this year, scientists all around the world will be watching with eager eyes as not one but two spacecraft observe Venus simultaneously.

[Spacemad]

When I look out of my window as the sun sets I can see a tiny pinprick of light high in the sky. As the evening goes on this pinprick of light gets brighter & brighter. Soon it becomes the brightest object in the sky before midnight.

Tomorrow at this time Messenger will have passed its closest point to Venus & will once again be on track for Mercury. It will have been a fantastic opportunity for the astronomers observing the planet as it will have made observations of the planet at the same time as Venus Express is there.

Venus Express will take readings of the portion of the planet that Messenger will observe before & after its arrival & departure giving scientists on Earth an unprecedented view of the "Bright & Morning Star".

At the same time as these two spacecraft are flying around the planet, observatories on Earth will try to observe the same portion of the planet, albeit, in infrared light, to try to complement the data obtained by the two spacecraft.

Tomorrow will be unique day which may never be repeated. After all it´s not every day, (or year), that two spacecraft will give complementary data on Venus coupled with observations on Earth!

[cndwrld]

Coordinated observations of Venus between VEX and Messenger

The ESA web page for the Messenger fly-by is now up, on the ESA Space Science page, at
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/index.html

If you click on the third story, labeled, "Venusian rendezvous results: chapter one", you go to the dedicated fly-by page at:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMVN4HYX3F_index_0.html

The fly-by page can also be reached from the dedicated Venus Express page at:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/index.html

[01101001]

ESA Venus Express News: 500 days at Venus, and the surprises keep coming

3 September 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.
[...]
While early results have already been published, some of the first detailed analyses are now being completed and will soon be published in acclaimed scientific journals.

[tusenfem]

Coordinated observations of Venus between VEX and Messenger

The ESA web page for the Messenger fly-by is now up, on the ESA Space Science page, at
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/index.html

If you click on the third story, labeled, "Venusian rendezvous results: chapter one", you go to the dedicated fly-by page at:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMVN4HYX3F_index_0.html

The fly-by page can also be reached from the dedicated Venus Express page at:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/index.html

One of the nice results of the combined observations of VEX and Messenger was that the cleaning up of the magnetic field data (VEX is a "dirty" spacecraft, no magnetic cleanliness) is very successful. This is good, and means that I will have a lot of work to do :-)

[Launch window]

Setting stars reveal planetary secrets

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Ex...H3FWB8F_0.html

[01101001]

ESA to present the latest Venus Express results to the media

How has our knowledge of Venus evolved since ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has been observing Earth’s twin? To answer this question and to present fresh new results concerning our cryptic neighbour, the European Space Agency is inviting the media to attend a press conference to be held at ESA Headquarters in Paris on 28 November.
[...]
The results will appear in a special section of the 29 November issue of the journal Nature containing nine individual papers devoted to Venus Express science activities.

[tusenfem]

Only a few more hours, and then the lock on the papers by Nature will be over!

[01101001]

Perhaps jumping the embargo that ends in about an hour...

Sydney Morning Herald: Venus ruined by greenhouse

ONCE styled as Earth's twin, Venus was transformed from a haven for water to a fiery hell by an unstoppable greenhouse effect, according to an investigation by the first space probe to visit our closest neighbour in more than a decade.

[...] Preliminary data from the probe reveals that Venus is more Earth-like than once thought.
[...]
Venus's atmosphere mostly comprises CO2 and a permanent blanket of clouds laced with sulphuric acid. There is no oxygen and little water, and the surface temperature hovers at 457 degrees.

But this was not always so, says Hakan Svedhem, a European Space Agency scientist and the lead author of the study published today in the journal Nature.

Venus, he believes, may have been partially covered with water before it became doomed by global warming.

[01101001]

AP: Venus Has Frequent Bursts of Lightning

"We consider this to be the first definitive evidence of abundant lighting on Venus," David Grinspoon of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science told reporters Wednesday at a briefing in Paris.

The finding is significant because lightning affects atmospheric chemistry, so scientists will have to take it into account as they try to understand the atmosphere and climate of Venus, he said.

The lightning is cloud-to-cloud and about 35 miles above the surface, said University of California, Los Angeles geophysics professor C.T. Russell, lead author of a paper on the Venusian fireworks. It is being published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

[01101001]

Nature: Space and astronomy: The girl next door

The runaway greenhouse effect that boiled away the oceans the planet seems to have started off with draws a lot of attention and speculation. But scientists are also interested in the rocks below. Venus, unlike Mars but like Earth, retains enough internal heat to drive large-scale planetary processes — flows in the mantle and the crust. But the ways these processes have played out on Earth and Venus are vastly different — in part, perhaps, because of that vicious greenhouse effect and the absent oceans.

[01101001]

Nature: European mission reports from Venus

Scientists today publish a suite of eight papers in Nature 1-8 reporting the first observations from the craft, which arrived at Venus — the second closest planet to the Sun and Earth’s next-door neighbour — in 2006. The probe represents the first dedicated mission to the planet since NASA’s Magellan mission ended in 1994, after using radar to map the planet. “Venus has been a forgotten planet for more than a decade,” says Håkan Svedhem, project scientist for the European Space Agency mission.

[01101001]

ESA: Latest Venus Express Results

Topics:

• Overview
• Temperatures on Venus: The unexpected temperature profile of Venus’s atmosphere
• Venus' restless atmosphere: The restless atmosphere of Venus
• Atmosphere and solar wind: Caught in the wind from the Sun
• Climate and evolution: Climate and Evolution

[tusenfem]

YEAH! my figures made it into Nature!

[loglo]

Congratulations Tusenfem! In which paper?

[tusenfem]

Thanks loglo!
It's in the Zhang et al. paper about how far the solar wind can penetrate the Venusian atmosphere.

I saw that the papers can all be downloaded from the nature website, for free. Unfortunately, I don't have the link here.

[loglo]

Here is a link to the pdf (400kb) Can't say I really understand it all but I find the result a little surprising given the lack of a global magnetic field.

[tusenfem]

Well, Tielong could have used another reading of the paper, I must say the text is not well written here and there.

Basically, what it says is that the solar wind and its magnetic field cannot go through Venus and that it piles up in front of the planet. Then we basically have the same situation as at Earth, there is a bowshock which decelerates the solar wind and a magnetopause created by the piled up magnetic field.

[loglo]

Thanks, that makes it clearer.

[01101001]

ESA: Venus Express reboots the search for active volcanoes on Venus

4 April 2008
ESA’s Venus Express has measured a highly variable quantity of the volcanic gas sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus. Scientists must now decide whether this is evidence for active volcanoes on Venus, or linked to a hitherto unknown mechanism affecting the upper atmosphere.
[...]
The only way to be absolutely certain that active volcanism is taking place on Venus is to see a volcano in action. This is not easy when you are trying to look through 100 km of thick, cloudy atmosphere. But the Venus Express team are working on two ways of doing this. The first is to look for localised increases in sulphur dioxide that would indicate a large plume of the gas issuing from a volcano. The other way is to look for hot spots on the surface that can be shown to be fresh lava flows.

[01101001]

ESA: Venus Express: New details on venusian clouds revealed

As ESA's Venus Express orbits our sister planet, new images of the cloud structure of one of the most enigmatic atmospheres of the Solar System reveal brand-new details.

[Manchurian Taikonaut]

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/obj...objectid=43110

15 Jul 2008
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.

[Swift]

From BBC.com

A European probe orbiting Venus has new data that indicates the planet may once had a lot of water on its surface and even had a system of plate tectonics.

The Venus Express craft has returned infrared maps that show heat variations among the surface rocks.

Scientists say some highland areas are slightly cooler, suggesting they have a different composition.

The German researchers working on the mission say these rocks could be akin to the continental rocks seen on Earth.

The new maps of Venus' southern hemisphere show that the rocks on the Phoebe and Alpha Regio plateaus are lighter in colour and look old compared with the majority of the planet. On Earth, such light-coloured rocks are usually granites.

This contrasts with basaltic rocks - characteristic of oceanic basins - seen by the Russian landers of the 1970s and 1980s which touched down away from the highlands.

"We know from modelling what the temperature of the surface should be and we compare that to what we measure, and then get an idea of what is the different heat emissivity of different types of rocks we see on the surface," said Joern Helbert from the German Aerospace Centre's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research.

"We see some of the highlands, especially the very young volcanic areas, look different. It's not all highlands that are different; it's mainly very young volcanic areas that look different," he told BBC News.

The observations fit neatly with the theory that the highland plateaus of Venus are ancient continents, once surrounded by ocean and produced by past volcanic activity.

[Swift]

An article from Science News about some of the latest finds of the Venus Express mission

New results from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft, which has been orbiting the cloud-shrouded planet since 2006, suggest that beneath the acidic cloak lies an extreme world that provides an important point of comparison for understanding Earth’s evolution.

“The more we actually get results from Venus, the more we see how important it is to study Venus if we want to learn more about the Earth and planetary systems in general,” says Venus Express project scientist Håkan Svedhem, who works for the European Space Agency out of Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Some regions in the southern hemisphere, she found, are emitting more heat than others. The warm areas, which appear to be younger, resembled volcanic terrains on Earth, complete with basaltic lava flows. Venus hosts at least nine volcanic hot spots, or mantle plumes, similar to the plumes thought to power the Hawaiian island chain, Smrekar and colleagues suggested in Science last year. She estimates that the present flows are between 250,000 and 2.5 million years old.

“It’s very likely that there has been volcanic activity recently,” says Svedhem, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis. “This is really something that we have been expecting to see, but it’s important to see it.”

Though alternative explanations for the Venusian veneer point toward cata*clysmic processes, Svedhem says the data support gradual resurfacing similar to that on Earth, suggesting that the two sisters may share some internal geology.

[cndwrld]

The Venus Express mission has a Science & Technology page (http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/are...cfm?fareaid=64) with status reports for the mission. Go to the box labeled "Latest Status Reports" and click on the dates to access the archived reports. Two reports have recently been added, covering operations in March and April of 2012.