This is encourgaging, but the time lag can be disheartening. It would be helpful to have access to all of the Huygens data by now...who knows - something in the data might have pushed a Titan/Enceladus mission ahead of Europa on the wish list...

Ad astra per bureaucracia.

But who funds those scientific institutes and agencies? The scientists didn't pay for Venus Express, European tax payers did, either through ESA or through other agencies. Also, the cost of the science payloads is often rather trivial compared to the cost of carrying them to Venus or Mars. It is very hard to argue that those images are not public property.

The University of Arizona built the camera on Huygens, and those pictures were released immediately. Nobody at U of A would say "these pictures belong to us!" I think criticism of this practice of witholding images and data should continue. In the long run, it will be good for ESA to change its attitudes, and it will get more public support.

Cannot avoid to firmly agree with you, Don.
I think we european tax payers should be hungry about this stupid policy!

I could not agree more. I can understand that ESA may well be limited in what they can do with regard to current missions where contracts may limit what they can and cannot do but the MER\Cassini examples have proven beyond doubt that there is a right way to do these things and it we need to make sure that in future the practice of releasing as much immediate data as possible becomes the minimum accepted practive.

There are two interesting articles in the June 2006 issue of Astronomy and Geophysics: "Venus Express arrives" by Andrew Coates and "Venus: The corona conundrum" by Peter M Grindrod and Trudi Hoogenboom.

Note for those who don't subscribe to A&G: The full Grindrod and Hoogenboom article can be downloaded here (~488 Kb PDF).

'Report for Period 11 June to 17 June 2006

During the reporting period, Venus Express experienced its first Safe Mode since launch. This occured on 12 June, DoY 163, at the end of a data recovery action due to a ground station problem on DoY 162.'

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=39400

New press release today.

Double vortex at Venus South Pole unveiled

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMYGQEFWOE_index_0.html

Wonderful images. The north polar vortex was discovered and imaged by the Pioneer Venus orbiter. The VIRTIS team has a nice page about this, with discussion of prior work: Polar Vortex

In case there were any other morons like me who couldn't "get" the double vortex, you're only "seeing" the night-side half of the vortex in the pictures on ESA's webpage. The dayside half of the vortex is washed out!

EDIT: *sigh*, nevermind. I'm a moron (see above)

Me too

I would love to know how the density of the nightime vortex compares with the daytime - does each vortex unwind and expand during the day, and compress and wind up at night? Or visa versa?

Or is this just where the key is - the one inserted in the atmosphere to wind it up to superrotational velocities

I sorted out the images at different wavelengths by date and put them on to a page here:
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/ve..._southpole.html

One strange thing: According to Hakan Svedhem there were six "slots" in which they could perform imaging, and most of the releases show six views of Venus' south pole. But in the "movie" that they released of the 5-micron image data, there is a 7th image (I think the second-to-last image in the sequence might be the extra one?).
Click to view attachment

When I annotated the animation with date/range information I made a guess as to what date/range it might be from. But after I tracked down this image from the presentation Svedhem made to VEXAG I don't think I guessed right.
Click to view attachment

Maybe that animation contains two views from "Slot #4", from the beginning and end of the observation period?

--Emily

Thanks for gathering the images up on your blog. VIRTIS looks like it could reveal a lot more about the circulation of the atmosphere.

It looks like there has been progress in numerical modeling of the atmosphere too: Venus Simulations

From today's update:

'Activities of Medium Term Planning 003 will start now with great focus on the Earth occultations season that starts on 11 July and will continue till the end of August.'

Monica Talevi just e-mailed me...There are news from Venus, stay alert:

"Have a look to website this afternoon: we are about to post a new science
release on Venus Express!"

Here it is...lots of nifty new animations!

Flying over the cloudy world – science updates from Venus Express

Thanks for the heads up, ustrax! I'll be digging into these pictures thoroughly today...

--Emily

Nice PR eye candy by ESA but there is still a serious gap in science due to the ongoing PFS malfunction, notwithstanding the claim that "other instruments will cover some of the PFS objectives."

Incredible ain't it Emily?...
This mission will surprise us just more and more...

I realize now that these are the pictures that they said they'd release in association with their presentations to the 36th COSPAR, to take place in Beijing on 16-23 July. There's a special session on Venus Express. Wish I could be there but travel to China is a bit out of the question at the moment

--Emily

Have you ever been to China before? If not, I highly recommend the trip.

Does anyone have a feel for the mean polarity of the Venus atmosphere is, with respect to the Earths? O2 and N2 are nonpolar, but I'm not sure about CO2, and H2O is highly polar - so are many sulfur compounds and all acids...

Polarity could come into play in interactions with the solar magnetosphere and the solar wind...magnitoshear?

Nope...Lou Friedman has grabbed all the China trip opportunities to date. Can't complain though as I have been sent to Cambridge, Noordwijk (in April! the tulips were fabulous), and Devon Island. Oh, and Darmstadt too, though Darmstadt in winter I do not recommend. --Emily

Venus Express is the first time a decent camera has been placed in orbit around Venus, which is very exciting. Exploiting the narrow near-infrared windows, VIRTIS should show new details about the atmospheric circulation, cloud formation, and perhaps surface vulcanism.

I believe it was the Australian astronomer, David Allen, who first realized that these infrared windows existed into the deep Venusian atmosphere (Nature, 1984). Images were taken by the Galileo spacecraft during a flyby, and Mark Bullock has done some intersting work using Earth-based astronomy to peer through these windows: Hawaii Telescope

I am also disapointed by the PFS failure. This provides added incentive now for JAXA to send Planet-C and hopefully answer some of the questions about the chemical makeup of the Venusian clouds.

OK, so now I have a question about the images and movies.

Looking at the very first movie captured in ultraviolet from VMC, the caption states: "The spacecraft was flying over the northern hemisphere approaching the planet, over distances ranging between about 39 100 and 22 600 kilometres from the surface. The images were taken at 365 nanometres, starting respectively 03:30 and 01:45 hours before reaching the pericentre." But if you watch the movie it looks like we are actually moving from one hemisphere toward the equator on approach. The shape of Venus Express' orbit is such that you approach over the southern hemisphere, fly close over the equator and northern hemisphere, and then retreat back out over the southern hemisphere. And if you look at the orbit diagram (here's one I pulled from Håkan Svedhem's VEXAG presentation), the times and distances do imply that we're looking primarily at the southern hemisphere, moving toward the equator, I think. Am I seeing this right?

--Emily

Click to view attachment

Don:

My understanding of Mark Bullock's image is that it actually provides a negative view of the dark side of Venus - so here's an inverted version:

Bob Shaw

Emily, I believe you are correct. The "flying over the northern hemisphere" phrase in their press release is confusing. I believe the movie we are seeing is "upside down" and we are coming up from the south. BY the way, the orginal gray version of the movie is much clearer than the blue-colored one.

Bob is right too. In the original Bullock image, the bright regions are thin spots in the clouds, where heat from the surface is shining through. That goes for the VIRTIS images too, I believe.

I think ESA is following the standard NASA algorithm for how to ruin a beautiful space image:

step 1. Expand the contrast until light and dark areas pop.
step 2. Apply a Laplacian sharpening filter until noise artifacts are prominant.
step 3. Enlarge the image with a nearest-neighbor filter, so pixels are big and square.
step 4. Pick an ugly primary color, like orange or purple, and colorize the image.

Just to illustrate, here is the original Hubble image of Venus, and the one released to the press:


Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

A meaty new Venus Express release is now online at the ESA site. It includes several animations and a wealth of science findings.

Its like they think that reality is too boring for the public. I think its ok to distort colors of objects that are commonplace and that people have a firm grip on. but anything that are uncommon exotic or in any way hard to reach for the common man should be depicted as close to reality as possible. otherwhise its deception.

I hate oversaturated contrast stretched space images. It only takes away the original beauty and subtleties of the real scene.

The first pictures from mars express are discustingly badly processed. the person that did it should be fired. The hubble picture is also quite garish.

why not just publish calibrated raw images?

/M

In one of the early Venera-13 papers, the Russian authors discussed the need to apply the inverse method (solving an integral equation) to correctly create RGB color from sensor inputs. They knew their math and radiometry, but didn't have easy access to computers to do it. In the West, you have the opposite -- big computers and relatively ad hoc image processing. I don't believe the colors in any of NASA's images, even when they are not "false".

I'm not sure these guys even know about the sRGB standard. If you know the spectrum of a color, there is a clear algorithm for creating a 24-bit color value. That's fine for some of the latest cameras that record huge spectral image cubes. But if you have signal levels from several sensors, with various spectral responses, then the problem of deriving the maximum-likelihood color value is nontrivial.

Malmer, I was impressed by how you processed the Mariner-10 images, calibrating the sensor weights with Mariner's Earth images.

i actually ended up relatively close to the responsecurve that where in that paper you sent me...

There's an interesting tidbit about the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) in the News section of the July 20, 2006, issue of Nature:

'You can't have a mission without a camera'
Jenny Hogan
Nature 442, 234 (2006).
doi:10.1038/442234a; Published online 19 July 2006
Full Text

A sister of the Mars Express probe has made it to Venus. And scientists have travelled to Beijing to discuss its first results. Horst Uwe Keller, who is presenting images from the craft's camera, spoke to Nature from the meeting.

I work on the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC). One of our main objectives is to study the highest clouds, around 70 kilometres above the planet's surface.

The VMC is the only instrument newly developed for this mission, the rest were reused from Mars Express and the comet mission Rosetta. They didn't have a camera, so I stepped in and said: "You can't have a mission without a camera." We built something very small, 1–2 kg, to replace the tiny camera on Mars Express that had watched the Beagle 2 lander as it separated.

The VMC is four cameras, one for ultraviolet light, one for visible and two for infrared. The results so far are qualitative — we haven't finished calibrating the instrument yet. But in the sequences of ultraviolet images I presented on Monday you can see the clouds moving, showing the wind direction.

As a young postdoc in the 1970s, I remember being at a meeting where a well-known astronomer claimed that Venus's clouds were made of droplets of sulphuric acid. At the time I thought he was crazy, but now we know this is true.

What we don't know yet is the nature of the 'ultraviolet absorber' that creates dark features in our cloud images. We hope one of the spectrometers will work out what it is.

We are also working on the infrared images, which we'll check for hot spots that might be active volcanism. The surface of Venus is very young, so we know there must be some volcanism, but no one has definitively seen it. If we're lucky we could also find out something about Venus's lightning using the visible-light filter.

Some of the most remarkable results at the meeting have come from VIRTIS — a spectrometer that probes the atmosphere from top to bottom. The pictures of the south pole are really spectacular: they show a double vortex created by the movement of the atmosphere between the equator and the pole.

For our team, however, the challenge is simply getting high-quality images. While the spacecraft was cruising into orbit, our camera ended up pointing at the Sun for about 50 hours. The Sun burnt its image into the photodetector. But it's not a complete disaster: we have been able to compensate for the damage by re-measuring the sensitivity of each pixel.

Ouch.
I noticed the VMC images aren't fully flatfielded, but I didn't realize this was the reason.
How'd the thing get pointed at the sun for 50 hours? Safe mode? Isn't it supposed to be... well... SAFE?

Don't worry, images will be perfect. Images taken by ... Messenger.
Please forgive me my sarcasm, but waiting for ESA's images is like
"Waiting for Godot".

VMC is kind of a primitive camera (VMC), but that doesn't mean it won't spot something interesting. I think VIRTIS is a more sophisticated experiment, but probably won't take as large a volume of images as VMC. As for learning what the UV absorber is, I'm afraid that rested with the PFS. Its failure cost them the chance to learn a major new thing at Venus.

I think there is one other major new things that VEX could discover -- IR images of active volcanism on the surface. That would be incredibly exciting.

Assuming <I hope otherwise> that the PFS stays disabled, there could be a real opportunity to fly a backup/flight-spare/engineering-model of the instrument on the Japanese Venus atmosphere orbiter mission. It's moderately well along the design development cycle, but I suspect that it's not too late to refly the PFS on that mission.

What guarantee do we have that the backup wouldn't fail the same way this one failed? Wouldn't it be wise to reevaluate the weak points in the design and improve it if necessary. Meaning additional costs?

Let me give a brief update about what I know regarding the publication of VEX science images and information, based on what I've heard over the last few days.

A major issue of Nature has been in planning for some time. It seems like it may come out in May, which would be nice since it would coincide with the one year anniversary of when VEX began routine science operations. Since most efforts now are focused on that paper, any other publications are unlikely until that issue comes out.

Getting more PR images out is getting pushed internally. I can't say that comments on this site have been taken into account, necessarily, but they are one factor that has been brought up in discussions. What I'm hearing now is that another PR person has been brought in at ESTEC to help Monica Televaes, and they are hoping to do the following:

- upcoming web stories in the end of March, 11 April and end of April.

- More information on the Ground based observations campaign will be coming up. There is a process in place to coordinate ground coverage of Venus during VEX observations, with the amatuer community.

-Try to do one web story per month, with one team each month.

-Try to put out more images in general.

It is possible they may fall short of this, but they are at least going to try it.

Cheers-

Don Merritt

They are rapidly approaching the first scheduled PSA release of VEX data - but we've seen it all before with Smart 1 so I'm not holding my breath.

Doug

That's Monica Talevi...
Dear Dan Mirrit...you've got a serious problem with names...

Don, I could not appreciate your reports more. Thanks so much.



That's nice to read. Now that amateurs are combining interesting filters with other advanced techniques, some images of science quality seem to be appearing.

Cheers...

And we'll likely see that amateur data before we ever see any VEX results... *sigh*...

Unless the VEX Science Operations Team is putting all this together to try and keep the *amateur* data secret, too??? (OK, I'm not really serious about that. I don't think...)

-the other Doug

Well, the mission isn't named VEX for nothing..... *ducks*

I am kinda hoping that amateurs end up 'scooping' the VEX people by publishing their results (if any) first. After all, the general rule is that he who publishes first gets most of the credit. The VEX people would have only themselves to blame, if their data (non)release policies end up costing them priority.

Bill

The problem is that the amateurs almost certainly will only have acess to their own data so these coordinated ground based observations are unlikely to reveal much that is new without the corresponding VEX data.

However this is a really interesting effort and I'm very happy to see that ESA is also doing this - it seems to be similar to the collaboration with the amateur Jupiter observing community that NH benefited from during it's recent flyby.

And I'd like to thank Don for his updates - they very much appreciated.

For those of you interested in the Venus data that amatuers are submitting to ESA,
the Venus Amateur Observing Project page is at:


http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...bodylongid=1856

You can click on "Results and Observations" in the right sidebar if you'd like to see some of the results so far.

Cheers-

Don Merritt

VEX Mission Ops Reporting, 11 - 17 March

At the end of the last CEB pass in the reporting period (DOY 076, 18:00z) Venus Express was
orbiting Venus at 195 million km from the Earth. The one-way signal travel time was 652 sec.

The Attitude and Orbit Control System (AOCS), power, thermal, mechanisms and fuel system continue to operate extremely well. Continued kudos to Astrium, and the flight control team at ESOC.

We did not receive a small amount of science data last week, because high winds at the Cebreros ground station required the antenna to be safed. That data was stored on board, and has now been downlinked. The data is transferred from Cebreros to a server at ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany. Our science teams pull their data off of that, knowing that the data is not final for at least a week or two after the actual downlink, just for such occurences. This recent data delay will not cause any problems. The Cebreros station is new, the schedule being driven primarily by VEX support requirements; it still has that new ground station smell. There are occasional problems with equipment or procedures, but just the usual small stuff one would expect.

VIRTIS movie passes are scheduled for the second week of April (DOY 98-101). This includes five orbits, where the mission constraints allow us to take extended mosaic images of the south pole from apocenter. Planning of science operations during this event is now finished. A proficiency pass is scheduled on DOY 078
with DSS-63 (Madrid 70-m DSN antenna) to test system readiness for this activity. Being able to use the DSN 70-meter antenna means that it greatlly increases our data rate. Using the DSN station in Madrid, located in the 'same' spot as the Cebreros antenna, means that we do not need to make any changes in our usual orbit timing; we'll be downlinking at the same time as we would have if we had used the Cebreros station. We have made regular but limited use of the DSN stations; in the past, it was only for radio science observations. NASA has been very helpful in this regard; ESA isn't charged for the time, but on the other hand we get whatever time is left over. We put in requests; if no one else needs that antenna at that time, they give it to us. We are always in a position to get bumped, but it hasn't happened yet. So it is great that we get the time, as ESA doesn't yet have any 70-meter dishes.

The science planning for the 14th month of operations (MTP014) has been completed, and final checks are to be done shortly at ESOC in Darmstadt. The science planning for MTP015 has also been completed. Spacecraft pointing requests have been approved by Flight Dynamics, and the flight control team received the instrument commanding files last Thursday for their final checks. I sure hope they work. This set covers the second half of our quadrature period, and the special and special Messenger Fly-By support observations.

We've been so busy, time has flown by. But 11 April 2006 was the day we got to Venus, so our first anniversary of Venus operations is almost here.

Cheers-

Don