Venus Express

By Michael on April 17, 2007 at 3:35 am | In Blog Posts |

ESA’s Venus Express is orbiting Venus as we speak and getting some cool data and taking some cool pictures.

Venus Express was launched on 9 November 2005 from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on board a Starsem Soyuz-Fregat rocket. It reached Venus about five months later, on 11 April 2006, when a delicate manoeuvre injected it into orbit around the planet. After a period of commissioning the spacecraft and the instruments, Venus Express started its nominal science operations on 4 July 2006.

The image at right is from the quoted (and linked) article at ESA. The sun break ups CO2 molecules on the daylight side and they are carried by atmospheric circulation to the night side where they combine into O2 and give off an “airglow”.

The detection of the airglow, and the capability to follow its evolution in time, is extremely important for several reasons.
“First, we can use the distribution and motion of these fluorescent O2 ‘clouds’ to understand how the atmospheric layers below move and behave,” said Giuseppe Piccioni, the other co-Principal Investigator on VIRTIS. “In this sense, the O2 airglow is a real ‘tracer’ of the atmospheric dynamics on Venus.”
“Second, the analysis of this phenomenon will provide new clues on how its global atmospheric chemistry works…

Planetary chemistry, Euro-style.

(via Ben)