Venus Express began orbiting Venus and transmitted first images

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The Venus Express spacecraft transmitted the first images to Earth since entering orbit around Venus on Tuesday. In the images, the fiery South Pole can be seen from a distance of 206,452 km. Mission scientists were intrigued by the sight of a dark vortex in one of the images.

Venus Express will circle Venus for about 500 Earth days and will explore the atmosphere, where the greenhouse effect has gone wild and out of control. The compressed atmosphere of Venus, consisting mainly of carbon dioxide, acts as a blanket, trapping the sun's heat radiation. This phenomenon causes an average temperature of 476 degrees Celsius.

The polar vortex

Experts have long suspected that there is a vortex at the south pole of Venus. It is a huge vortex that includes a binocular configuration like the one that has long been observed at the planet's north pole. However, almost no observations were made in the South Pole area. "We can have a huge storm there similar to the one we know from the North Pole says mission scientist Horst Hugh Keller.

The Venus Express team of scientists said that they are interested in knowing how these storms remained stable and where they get their energy. European Space Agency officials say that the images are surprisingly bright and have more detail than expected.

The images were taken on April 12 using two instruments on the spacecraft - Vitris (infrared imaging spectrometer) and VMC (monitoring camera) when the spacecraft passed over the equator.

The image taken from Vitris (in artificial colors) shows the day side of Venus on the left and the night side on the right, at a scale of 50 kilometers per pixel.

The successful image of the night side of Venus was obtained using an infrared filter and it showed active spiral cloud structures in the lower atmosphere, at an altitude of about 55 kilometers (the planet Venus is similar in size to Earth). The dark areas represent a thicker cloud layer and the lighter ones - thinner clouds.

The Arctic vortex was photographed by the Mariner 10 spacecraft in the XNUMXs.

The VMC photograph shows Venus at a scale of 150 km per pixel and is also artificially colored. It is photographed in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

On Tuesday of this week, the Venus Express spacecraft turned on its engines for about 50 minutes to slow down its speed and capture Venus's gravity.
As the spacecraft lowers its orbit in the coming months, the scientists are expected to take more detailed pictures. The scientists hope to learn how Venus, which is similar in size, mass and composition to Earth, became such a different place over the past 4.6 billion years.

The Venus Express mission is the first to Venus in 15 years.