Credits: ESA/INAF-IASF, Rome, Italy, and Observatoire de Paris, France
This false-colour composite, built with images taken by the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) onboard Venus Express, the first-ever images of the hothouse planet’s south pole from a distance of 206 452 kilometres. . ESA’s Venus Express has showed surprisingly clear structures and unexpected detail. The images were taken 12 April during the spacecraft’s initial capture orbit after successful arrival on 11 April 2006.
Engineers have lost no time in switching on several of the instruments and then the VMC (Venus Monitoring Camera) and VIRTIS (Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) imaged, for the first time in space history, the southern hemisphere of Venus as the spacecraft passed below the planet in an elliptical arc.
Scientists are especially intrigued by the dark vortex shown almost directly over the south pole, a previously suspected but until now unconfirmed structure that corresponds to a similar cloud structure over the north pole.
“Just one day after arrival, we are already experiencing the hot, dynamic environment of Venus,” said Dr Hakan Svedhem, Venus Express project scientist. “We will see much more detail at an unprecedented level as we get over 100 times better resolution as we get closer to Venus, and we expect to see these spiral structures evolve very quickly.”
The initial, low-quality images were taken from an extreme distance of 206 452 kms from the planet, yet caught scientists’ attention, particularly with the surprisingly clear structures and unexpected details shown in the VIRTIS spectrometer images.
The false-colour VIRTIS composite image shows Venus’s day side at left and night side at right, and corresponds to a scale of 50 kms per pixel.
The day half is itself a composite of images taken via wavelength filters and chiefly shows sunlight reflected from the tops of clouds, down to a height of about 65 km above the planet’s surface.
