First images of Venus’s south pole revealed
It has been an eventful few days for the Venus Express spacecraft.
After entering orbit around its target planet on Tuesday, the observatory turned on its instruments and snapped the first images ever taken of the swirling atmosphere above the Venusian south pole on Wednesday.
The European Space Agency released two false-colour images taken by the spacecraft’s Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) and Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) on Thursday.
The striking VIRTIS image shows the planet split into a day and night side. The day side shows a composite picture of various wavelengths capturing mostly sunlight reflected off the tops of clouds.
The more dramatic night side, taken in the infrared, features a large vortex of clouds spiralling in toward the pole. In this half of the image, the brighter areas indicate thinner clouds, as these allow more thermal radiation from below to shine through. The darker features show thicker clouds.
Picture of Europe’s Venus Express into the orbit
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