Venus Express mission

Abstract

[1] Venus Express is well and healthy and has now been providing exciting new data from Venus, our nearby twin planet, for over 2 years. Many of the new results are presented and discussed in the subsequent papers in this special section. The overall scientific objective of Venus Express is to carry out a detailed study of the atmosphere of Venus, including the interaction of the upper atmosphere with the solar wind and the interaction of the lowest part of the atmosphere with the surface of the planet. In addition, the plasma environment and magnetic fields as well as some aspects of the surface of the planet are addressed. For the first time, investigations make systematic use of the transparent infrared spectral windows in order to probe the atmosphere in four dimensions: three spatial dimensions plus time. The spacecraft design is taken from Mars Express with some modifications necessary owing to the specific environment around Venus. The payload is composed of three spectrometers, a camera, a magnetometer, an instrument for detecting energetic particles, and a radio science package. The orbit is polar and highly elliptic, with a pericenter altitude of about 200 km over the northern polar region and an apocenter altitude of 66,000 km. Presently, the coverage of the southern hemisphere is very good, but important gaps still do exist. The coverage of the northern hemisphere is much less dense. Venus Express is a part of the European Space Agency's program for the exploration of the inner solar system, which includes missions to study the Sun, Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, and comets and asteroids.

The relationship between mesoscale circulation and cloud morphology at the upper cloud level of Venus from VMC/Venus Express

“…We study the atmospheric dynamics on Venus at the upper cloud level on the basis of UV images acquired by the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) (Markiewicz et al, 2007a) onboard Venus Express from May 2006 to September 2013 (Svedhem et al, 2009;Titov et al, 2006). The previous work by Khatuntsev et al (2013) presented results of the digital cloud tracking method for the low latitudes.…”

Venus: The Atmosphere, Climate, Surface, Interior and Near-Space Environment of an Earth-Like Planet

“…Venus Express (Svedhem et al 2009), which arrived at Venus on 11 April 2006 and ceased operations in 2016, was the 43rd spacecraft to be dispatched towards Venus, and the 25th to largely succeed in its mission. The scientific focus was on the planet's cloudy atmosphere, and its inhospitable and extreme surface climate.…”

Venus Atmospheric Thermal Structure and Radiative Balance

“…VIRTIS near infrared observations ended after two years of operation but continued to provide reflected solar observations (0.25-1.0 μm). Another experiment on Venus Express, the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (Formisano et al 2006), did not return any data due to a hardware problem (Svedhehm et al 2009) but would have provided observations in the thermal range where Venus loses its heat to space (8-15 μm). There have been no entry probes to Venus after the VeGa 1 and 2 landers (June 1985).…”