Scientists have used ESA’s Venus Express to characterise the wind and upper cloud patterns on the night side of Venus for the first time-with surprising results.The study shows that atmosphere on Venus’ night side behaves very differently to that on the side of the planet facing the Sun (the ‘dayside’), exhibiting unexpected and previously-unseen cloud types, morphologies, and dynamics — some of which appear to be connected to features on the planet’s surface.“This is the first time we’ve been able to characterise how the atmosphere circulates on the night side of Venus on a global scale,” says Javier Peralta of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Japan, and lead author of the new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “While the atmospheric circulation on the planet’s dayside has been extensively explored, there was still much to discover about the night side. We found that the cloud patterns there are different to those on the dayside, and influenced by Venus’ topography.”
Instead, the super-rotation seems to be more irregular and chaotic on the night side. Night side upper clouds form different shapes and morphologies than those found elsewhere-large, wavy, patchy, irregular, and filament-like patterns, many of which are unseen in dayside images — and are dominated by unmoving phenomena known as stationary waves.
“This study challenges our current understanding of climate modeling and, specifically, the super-rotation, which is a key phenomenon seen at Venus,” says Håkan Svedhem, ESA Project Scientist for Venus Express. “Additionally, it demonstrates the power of combining data from multiple different sources-in this case, remote sensing and radio-science data from Venus Express’ VIRTIS and VeRa, complemented by ground-based observations from IRTF’s SpeX. This is a significant result for VIRTIS and for Venus Express, and is very important for our knowledge of Venus as a whole.”
Given the very long days and nights on Venus, is the surface temperature significantly lower at night? Low enough to make a probe viable?John
Quote from: John-H on 09/18/2017 01:32 amGiven the very long days and nights on Venus, is the surface temperature significantly lower at night? Low enough to make a probe viable?JohnWhy would you send a probe to the surface to study winds and weather paterns? Floating or flying probes equipped with radar can get you all the required data.
Quote from: high road on 09/22/2017 03:03 pmQuote from: John-H on 09/18/2017 01:32 amGiven the very long days and nights on Venus, is the surface temperature significantly lower at night? Low enough to make a probe viable?JohnWhy would you send a probe to the surface to study winds and weather paterns? Floating or flying probes equipped with radar can get you all the required data.Floating is a good idea for atmospheric science, but you still need a lander vehicle for drilling, rock chemistry, and especially seismology.
Quote from: redliox on 09/23/2017 02:48 amQuote from: high road on 09/22/2017 03:03 pmQuote from: John-H on 09/18/2017 01:32 amGiven the very long days and nights on Venus, is the surface temperature significantly lower at night? Low enough to make a probe viable?JohnWhy would you send a probe to the surface to study winds and weather paterns? Floating or flying probes equipped with radar can get you all the required data.Floating is a good idea for atmospheric science, but you still need a lander vehicle for drilling, rock chemistry, and especially seismology.With current state of technology a surface probe will survive for just a few days, at most. Probably shorter. Challenges: very high atmospheric pressure, extremely high surface- and atmospheric temperatures and highly corrosive atmosphere.Had a lander for sustained surface operations (say longer than 2 days) been possible there already would have been sent one. That much I'm convinced of. But as the Venera's demonstrated the operational duration of surface probes on Venus is measured in minutes (hours at best), not days.
