Computer Science
Scientific paper
Apr 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003eaeja....13123l&link_type=abstract
EGS - AGU - EUG Joint Assembly, Abstracts from the meeting held in Nice, France, 6 - 11 April 2003, abstract #13123
Computer Science
Scientific paper
The Venus Express orbiter mission planned for launch in 2005 and the Japanese Planet C Orbiter Mission to Venus planned for launch in 2008 together provide an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the thermal structure of the atmosphere of Venus using the radio occultation technique. As currently planned, the Venus Ex-press will go into a polar orbit (˜18-24 hour period) and Planet C into a near equato-rial orbit (172^o inclination, ˜30 hour period). These orbits will provide many mu-tual occultations between the two satellites, and periodically, occultations with re-spect to the earth. The advantage of the mutual occultations is that the locations and the time-of-day for the occultation zone is not aliased by the celestial Venus-Earth geometry that results in a very biased sampling of latitudes and local times. A simi-lar approach is being considered for investigation of the Martian atmosphere through Mars Scout opportunity (Kursinski et al., 2003). Unfortunately, due to lack of coor-dination and foresight, the opportunity to use the Mars Global Surveyor and the Mars Odyssey orbiters for mutual occultations has been lost. The realization of this invaluable opportunity requires that the communication in-struments on the two orbiters be mutually compatible and capable of receiving and measuring the Doppler shift of the signal between the two orbiters. Further, it is likely that Venus Express will have completed its nominal mission by the time Planet C arrives at Venus, hence the transmitter on Venus Express will need to be left turned so that the atmospheric signature of the Doppler shift in its signal as received on Planet C orbiter can be analyzed to determine the thermal structure, with perhaps 100 m vertical resolution. Such a high vertical resolution has been demon-strated through mutual occultations between the GPS constellation and METSAT on earth (Kursinski et al., 1997). With the looming prospect of a third orbiter around Venus through NASA's Discovery program in the next decade, the opportunity to obtain a unique and extensive sampling of the Venus atmosphere is being presented, and it is up to the mission teams to coordinate their efforts to realize its full potential that minimal resources.
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