Abstract
The atmosphere and ionosphere of Venus have been studied in the past by spacecraft with remote sensing1,2,3,4 or in situ techniques3,4. These early missions, however, have left us with questions about, for example, the atmospheric structure in the transition region from the upper troposphere to the lower mesosphere (50–90 km) and the remarkably variable structure of the ionosphere. Observations become increasingly difficult within and below the global cloud deck (<50 km altitude), where strong absorption greatly limits the available investigative spectrum to a few infrared windows and the radio range. Here we report radio-sounding results from the first Venus Express Radio Science5 (VeRa) occultation season. We determine the fine structure in temperatures at upper cloud-deck altitudes, detect a distinct day–night temperature difference in the southern middle atmosphere, and track day-to-day changes in Venus’ ionosphere.
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Acknowledgements
We thank H. Svedhem, F. Jansen, the Project Science Team at ESTEC and the Flight Control Team at ESOC for continuous support. The German and the US part of VeRa are supported by DLR, Bonn-Oberkassel and by a contract with NASA, respectively.
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Pätzold, M., Häusler, B., Bird, M. et al. The structure of Venus’ middle atmosphere and ionosphere. Nature 450, 657–660 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06239
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06239
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