Venus Express

[DonPMitchell]

I'm drumming my fingers on the desktop, waiting.  One thing you can say about NASA, they know their funding depends on public support.  If they put a probe into orbit around a planet, there would be a press conference with cool pictures immediately afterwards.  In Europe, they have a cocktail party for the bureaucrats first...

[DonPMitchell]

First the good news.  These are the best pictures of one of the poles of Venus ever, better than Venera-15 or Pioneer Venus.  Looks like the IR camera will show amazing details of the atmospheric circulation of the planet (which has never been simulated or fully understood).

The bad news is, the ESA is not very open about public access to their images and data.  There are still only about 100 publicity images from Mars Express, and I fear it is going to be just as hard to see what Venus Express is doing.

I'm ranting, and I hope I will be wrong.  But look at how NASA puts all the images from the Mars rovers, Casini, and (on PDS) all the data and images from every mission.  The EU suffers from too many layers of representation and burocracy between its intellectual elite and the people.  The data is for the scientists, to publish and dominate the field, and their funding is insulated from public choice enough that they don't care if people know anything beyond "look how clever we are...we paid the Russians...er...I mean...Europe sent a probe to Venus!".  OK, I'm annoyed, I guess you figured that out...

[spacecat27]

Yeah, it's a diffierent world over there! 

Those are amazing images though- which will send me off web snooping because at the moment I forget how long a Venus day is.  You see hints of complex circulation like that- knowing it's heat-driven- and begin to wonder if that heating is fairly even or notably cyclic... then begin to wonder what sort of wind speeds have been measured there, etc., etc....
I'm off... 

[DonPMitchell]

The body of the planet turns very slowly, in a retrograde rotation of 243 days.  But the atmosphere circulates around the planet in about 4 days!  This is one of the poorly-understood facts, why the atmosphere super rotates.

In addition, there is the well-understood hadley-cell circulation from equator to pole, so you get the combination of those two cirulcations forming the vortext appearance.

One thing you can't see from the half image in the press release, is that there is a double-vortex structure right at the pole.

[DonPMitchell]

Still no pictures...

The two instruments I'm hoping to see in action are VIRTIS, which produced the cool thermal infrared image above, and the VMC which takes four 400x400 pixels images at different wavelengths.  The 1000 nm IR window is especially important, because it is a narrow windows that penetrates the cloud layer.  It may give images as far down as the surface itself.

Unfortunately, VIRTIS is run by Fred Taylor, who has a poor history of sharing information with the public.  The only NASA images of Venus that have never been made available are his Pioneer-Venus images.  He's also the man who has written a number of times that 'Pioneer Venus was the first satellite of Venus' -- In fact, it came 18 months after Venera-9 and 10 were in orbit.  Here is his synopsis of the history of Venus probes:

http://www-atm.physics.ox.ac.uk/project/virtis/venus-past.html

Is it my imagination, or is something missing?

Have I mentioned that I'm annoyed that ESA is not posting the Venus Express data?