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The Akatsuki spacecraft of Japan was launched on May 21, 2010. The spacecraft planned to enter a Venusencircling near-equatorial orbit in December 7, 2010; however, the Venus orbit insertion maneuver has failed, and at present the spacecraft is orbiting the Sun. There is a possibility of conducting an orbit insertion maneuver again several years later. The main goal of the mission is to understand the Venusian atmospheric dynamics and cloud physics, with the explorations of the ground surface and the interplanetary dust also being the themes. The angular motion of the spacecraft is roughly synchronized with the zonal flow near the cloud base for roughly 20 hours centered at the apoapsis. Seen from this portion of the orbit, cloud features below the spacecraft continue to be observed over 20 hours, and thus the precise determination of atmospheric motions is possible. The onboard science instruments sense multiple height levels of the atmosphere to model the three-dimensional structure and dynamics. The lower clouds, the lower atmosphere and the surface are imaged by utilizing nearinfrared windows. The cloud top structure is mapped by using scattered ultraviolet radiation and thermal infrared radiation. Lightning discharge is searched for by high speed sampling of lightning flashes. Night airglow is observed at visible wavelengths. Radio occultation complements the imaging observations principally by determining the vertical temperature structure.

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Abstract. Although linkages between solar activity and the earth's climate have been suggested and the 11-year cycle in solar activity evident in sunspot numbers is the most examined example of periodicity in previous studies, no quantitative evidence indicating a relationship for tropospheric phenomena has been found for a short period. Based on FFT analysis for OLR (Outgoing Longwave Radiation) compared with the F10.7 index, we clearly demonstrate a 27-day variation in the cloud amount in the region of the Western Pacific warm pool, which is only seen in the maximum years of 11-year solar activity. The average spectrum in such years also shows an enhancement in the range of the MJO (MaddenJulian Oscillation) period. Although there exist some explanations for possible mechanisms, the exact cause is unknown. Therefore, the proposed connection between 27-day cloud variation and solar cycle in the WPWP region is still a hypothesis and various kinds of varification based on other meteorological and solar parameters are strongly required.