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Watching Venus glow in the dark

24 February 2009

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Venus Express looks through the 'infrared windows'

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This artist's impression shows Venus Express focussing on studying the peculiar atmosphere of Venus, with a precision never achieved before. In doing so, the mission is making the first ever use of the so called 'infrared windows' present in Venus' atmosphere; they are narrow bands in the atmospheric spectrum, discovered in the 1980s thanks to ground observations. Looking through these 'windows' Venus Express is able to gather precious information about the lower layers of the atmosphere and even the surface.

Credits: ESA - AOES Medialab

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This false-colour composite image of Venus’s atmosphere was obtained by the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on board ESA’s Venus Express, from a limb (or profile) perspective.

The top panel shows the oxygen nightglow of Venus at an altitude of approximately 96 km over the surface of the planet, seen at a wavelength of 1.27 microns.

The bottom panel shows the same portion of the atmosphere observed at the same time, but at a different wavelength (around 1.22 microns). Here it is possible to see the nightglow of nitric oxide, which is much weaker than that of oxygen and comes from an higher altitude — around 110 km above the surface.

In red is the thermal emission of Venus at 1.74 microns; one of the atmospheric windows of Venus exploited by VIRTIS.

Credits: ESA/VIRTIS/INAF-IASF/Obs. de Paris-LESIA

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