Venus Lightning

Physics

Scientific paper

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3304 Atmospheric Electricity, 3324 Lightning, 5408 Aurorae And Airglow, 6295 Venus

Scientific paper

While the atmosphere of Venus is relatively dry, it has an extensive and dynamic cloud cover consisting of sulfuric acid droplets that can and do support lightning. Unambiguous signatures of transient electromagnetic pulses were seen by Venera 11-14 landers and pulses of whistler mode waves were observed propagating out of the Venus atmosphere into the ionosphere by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter. Flashes were observed by the Venera 9 visible spectrometer and by a 61" terrestrial telescope. Still because some studies either returned null results or found properties different than those of terrestrial lightning, Venus lightning became controversial. The signal strength observed by the electric antennas at 100Hz on Pioneer Venus was sufficiently strong that such signals were predicted to be detectable by the Venus Express fluxgate magnetometer. Thus a high rate (128Hz) sampling mode was included in the design of the magnetometer. This system has successfully identified strong electromagnetic signals leaving the atmosphere guided by the magnetic field. When the ionospheric magnetic field is nearly horizontal no signals are seen but when the magnetic field dips into the ionosphere signals are observed nearly 50% of the time. While the orbit of the Venus Express mission is not ideally suited for mapping the entire surface of Venus, we expect to obtain some information on the occurrence rate as a function of local time and latitude over much of the northern hemisphere.

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