VEX Nature Papers Available

The suite of VEX papers published in the journal Nature are available at:

http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/venusexpress/index.html

The are available for open use, and they are free.

For anyone interested in Venus, or climate modeling in general, the sum of the papers is much more than the individual ones. Taken together, it seems that we can finally begin to understand how the place works, and how it got to be the way it is. It is an atmosphere which works totally different than Earths, and it is fascinating stuff.

I think ESA has done a good job with the graphics used to illustrate the main talking points from the papers and the news conference which was held in conjunction with the Nature release. To view them, you can go to:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/...73R8F_0_ov.html

I can't open the pictures in the article "Caught in the wind from the Sun:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/SEM0G373R8F_0.html

That must have cost ESA a pretty penny. Free access isn't exactly Nature's strong point.

Brilliant to see the results beginning to come out - can't begin to pretend I understand much of it yet - but I'll get there

I guess giving free access to papers is a form of outreach/PR...good idea! (though probably expensive)

Opening up the papers to public access is indeed expensive, but ESA must have thought the results significant enough to fund it. But FYI, the public access is only temporary, on the order of a couple months. So anyone interested in the results should not wait too long before checking it out.

Planetary Science Operations Consolidated At ESAC

ESA maintained its science operations teams for planetary missions at the European Space and Technology Center (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. But 18 January is my last day at ESTEC, and I'm the last person in science operations scheduled to transfer. With my departure, all planeary science operations, with the exception of MEX, will be done at the European Space and Astronomy Center (ESAC). This includes VEX, Rosetta, and upcoming missions. The astronomy missions were there previously, so with minor exceptions all ESA science operations will be done at ESAC. And the site is expanding, so we anticipate more things being moved or started there in the future.

If you're interested, ESAC is at: 40°26'38.83"N, 3°57'12.26"W. I Tried to attach a Google KMZ file, but it said that I was not permitted to upload this type of file. Too bad. If you Google Earth the location, you can see that there is a castle overlooking the site, sitting just to the left.

The ESAC site info on the ESA web pages is at:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESAC/index.html

When I toured the 'back office' of ESOC at the Rosetta Mars Flyby, there were control rooms for many missions - have all those transfered to ESAC now then as well? And what will be conducted at ESOC and ESTEC in the future? Would future press events ( like the mars flyby) be held at ESAC instead now?

No offense to any German readers - but Madrid sounds like a much more exciting trip than Darmstadt

Good luck with the move!

Doug

Third anniversary of this interesting page developed by Venus Express Group.
http://www-atm.physics.ox.ac.uk/project/vi...tis-images.html
Congratulation to University of Oxford.
(Sorry, it's joke. "Coming soon" are key words of a joke.)

First of all, that page is not developed by a big Venus Express Group. It was made by a single grad student (who is pretty much the largest part of the Oxford Venus Express 'Group'), whilst probably trying to avoid writing his thesis. If he didn't make this page there would be nothing at all. About the images, even if he wanted and had time to put images on it, I'm not sure he'd get permission by PI's to do this outside of the main ESA site and/or before it's all in PDS.
It's not all as simple as it seems. Pretty much all outreach done by university staff is done in their (limited) spare time. They're not payed at all for these kinds of efforts (often it actually costs them money). In short, outreach is not on the university's agenda, which brings us back to the ever-occurring problem of ESA outreach, since almost all scientists on ESA missions are not employed by ESA, but by universities. Even their research grants for ESA science don't come from ESA, but from the National research councils.

mods-feel free to move this to ESA PR thread.

Well, I thought it was funny, and I'm not a rabid ESA hater.

I do thank remcook for the background info. It was interesting, if not funny.

Sorry for the long delay in answering Doug's question. I've been getting my household moved to Spain. Thanks for the good wishes; it is nice to finally be here. From the Madrid area, there is a large, bright object in the sky for about 10 hours a day which gives off a lot of light and heat. I'm trying to identify it.

The actual ESA spacecraft operations will remain at ESOC, in Darmstadt Germany. So exciting events will still be done from there. Those rooms that were toured are still there, and still full of activity from the excellent operation teams.

What has now been relocated to ESAC, near Madrid, is the science operations. MEX is something of a special case, as RAL in England is heavily involved in MEX science operations, so that isn't being moved. But Rosetta and VEX will now have science operations done from ESAC. And future missions are expected to be done from there. We will work with the instrument teams to collate and check their instrument commands; those are then sent to ESOC for a final check, and for upload to the spacecraft.

I saw that here last week too. Kind of low in the southern sky. Really, really bright. Could hear everyone up and down the hallway lowering their blinds, since it made it hard to read your screen. Fortunately it went away after about 30 minutes. We're calling it "the bright yellow thing."

So you say ESA is observing this too?

--Greg (Seattle) :-)

ESA has put out a press release about a paper published by the Venus Express VIRTIS team. The paper gives some details about the composition of the lower atmosphere. You can see it on the Science and Tech pages (with graphs!) at
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=42249

and the general press release at
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Venus_Express/SEMMJ432VBF_0.html

Five new VEX's images. I'm shocked.
The light and dark of Venus

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Well it reached mine - much appreciated.

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

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

Planetary Science Archive Dataset Browser

I had no idea it had been released! Sweet!

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?

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):

Click to view attachment

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.

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:

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

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.

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.

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).

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,

I have now downloaded ALL of the data -- it took forever because for some reason I was only getting about 50 K/s download speeds. So it took about 4 days. A good thing for my computer to work on while I was on vacation I am slowly working toward getting a browse page set up; first thing is to run everything through IMG2PNG. It's possible I may have browse pages with thumbnails only posted before I get to the massive pile of actual data.

--Emily

As promised...just the UV images, and just the browse resolution, but links take you to the .IMG files. It'll be a couple of days before I can get to the IMG2PNG batch conversion, but this is a start!

http://planetary.org/data/vex/

--Emily

Other data has been released too, including VIRTIS:

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=43446

I'd say: go for it

Venus Express searching for life – on Earth.
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMUOW4N0MF_index_0.html

We've been using the Virtis imaging spectrometer two or three times a month to observe the Earth, to get a baseline on what a habitable planet looks like in the spectra.

VIRTIS data released.
ftp://psa.esac.esa.int/pub/mirror/VENUS-EXPRESS/VIRTIS/

Example:
Click to view attachment
Description:
1. Near-IR surface band 1.02um (equalized)
2. Infrared airglow band 1.27um (equalized)
3. Infrared atmospheric window at 1.74um (equalized)
4. Infrared atmospheric window at 2.3um (equalized)
5. Summing of bands 3.67um to 3.77um (equalized)
6. Summing of thermic bands 5um to 5.12um (equalized)
7. Summing of odd bands 2.2um-2.4um (masked and filtered)
8. Surface elevation from Magellan geometric data

Wow, Peter, I ignored the possibility to see major surface features in near IR from orbit! Is like to see Cassini Titan surface images for the first time, after delusion from Voyager...

Dima Titov is one of the science leaders of the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) on Venus Express, and an all-around nice guy. He was greatly involved in getting Venus Express designed and approved inside of ESA. He is now the leader on a paper that is published today (04 Dec 08) in Nature on the source of the distinctive banding in the Venusian clouds. It is a short, 4 parge Letter, but very interesting (if you're into this sort of thing).

+ VENUS EXPRESS UNVEILS THE CAUSE OF VENUS' GLOBAL CLOUD PATTERNS
A recent study combining the multi-wavelength data from the VMC and the VIRTIS instruments on board Venus Express has
shed light on the atmospheric conditions that are responsible for the characteristic ultraviolet features in
the Venusian cloud deck.

http://sci.esa.int/jump.cfm?oid=43792

While the paper is up, you can also go directly to: www.nature.com.

The article above mentions that the UV absorber appears to be drawn from the lower clouds...I wonder if the absorber is being recycled: Brought to the cloud tops, broken down by uv, reconstituted and brought up again... or if there is a fixed amount in the atmosphere and it just goes up and down.... still very mysterious! News from VEX has been...well there hasn't been any for a while now (not a complaint, just an observation), does anyone know if there are any articles or papers in the works?

http://www.agu.org/journals/je/special_sec...;journalCode=JE
2 special issues of JGR just published/about to be published with quite some papers.

Thank you! Some fascinating papers, in particlular some dealing with what looks to be a CO-OCS cycle between the lower and middle atmosphere, exact chemistry still to be determined. Apparently some aerosols of unsual composition or unusual size at the poles... could that have some bearing on the question of the 'mode 3' particles? Venus is still guarding its mysteries.

In the ESA Planetary Science Archive (PSA), at http://www.rssd.esa.int/psa, there is now available some additional VEX data:

- the entire nominal mission for the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC)
- The first 2 releases (up to orbit 235) of raw data for SPICAV SOIR, the solar spectral imager
- The first 3 releases (up to orbit 799) of the extended mission for VMC.

Wow, this is quite interesting...a VIRTIS thermal map of the southern hemisphere.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMUQCLXOWF_Expanding_0.html

Total temperature range is 20C, and it seems to match the topography pretty well, though. Maybe there is some extra heat around 60E.

From 'Science Daily':

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/...90916092536.htm

I found this summary of Venus science from the Europlanet conference interesting reading, and the latest day/night Venus image particularly satisfying. My main reason for posting, though, is that I have a query that someone here may be able to answer. A major part of the article is about the enrichment of heavy water in the atmosphere and its implications. Now I recall a very interesting earlier piece about what I suppose we can call heavy carbon dioxide: how the asymmetry of the molecule (O16 and O18) produces distinctive extra IR absorption features in the spectrum that increase it's effectiveness as a greenhouse gas on Venus.

The question is: does heavy water containing H1 and H2 behave in a similar way? If so, does this have any significant effect on either Venus, Earth or Mars?

EDIT - A further question has just occurred to me. What about even heavier water containing normal hydrogens and O18? Is that also enriched on Venus? The answer would tell us whether most of the escaping hydrogen leaves Venus still bound to water molecules, or after those molecules have been dissociated in the upper atmosphere.

I'll take a hands-waving stab at it.

Heavy water HDO should cause an IR shift due to a new assymetry and due to the much larger change going from H (1 amu) doubling up to D (2 amu).
But I don't think the difference will be as impressive, since the original H2O IR absorbance is very broad (I believe due to transient intermolecular H-bonds of the molecules flying around - tends to broaden the vibrational states).

H2O18 is still a symmetrical molecule. So the only difference will be that the absorbance will shift due to the difference in atomic weight 1H-18O vs 1H-16O. But for the same reasons above, the band will still be broad.

[Theoretically, the broadening should be "different" with a transient O-D-O network compared to O-H-O network.]

Thanks Mike, that gives useful insight on the first Q. (The second Q was really more about the mechanism of water loss than the water-with-O18 IR spectrum itself, but your reply was interesting anyway.)

Found this through Google - heavy water isn't blue!

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt...sa%3DN%26um%3D1

That is a very cool link!

OT, but I poking through that link I found this "gem" on Triboluminescence.

I spent last evening rubbing two quartz pieces I found in our yard together to make them glow.
(Giggling like a little kid the whole time..wheee!!!!)

ever tried crushing a sugarcube in the dark? Try and you will be amazed

Open an envelope, crack a mint in half. Same thing.