What is the weather like at night on Venus? This is a question that anyone would want to find the answer to. Recently, scientists have opened up opportunities to discover the answer.
Venus is relatively close to Earth and has been studied by astronomers for a long time. The first probe landed on this planet in 1978. However, scientists know very little about the weather at night on Venus.
One day on Venus equals 120 days on Earth.
In a recent study, scientists discovered a new method to use infrared sensors on the Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki orbiting Venus.
Akatsuki is a probe that entered orbit around Venus in 2015. Now, the spacecraft can help scientists better understand the nighttime weather on this planet. The sensors have detected clouds at night and some rather unusual wind patterns.
Like Earth, Venus is located in the “habitable zone”. Venus has a solid surface along with an atmosphere that features weather. To understand a planet’s weather, scientists need to study the movement of clouds in infrared light.
However, Venus itself has the slowest rotation speed compared to any major planet in the solar system. This means that days and nights last quite a long time. One day on Venus is about 120 days on Earth.
So far, only the weather on the “daytime side” of Venus has been easily observable. Even using infrared light makes it difficult to clearly see the nighttime side of Venus. There have been infrared observations of the “nighttime side” of Venus, but these studies could not clearly indicate the planet’s weather at that time.
To explore this mysterious aspect of our neighboring planet, researchers utilized the Akatsuki probe. The probe is designed to monitor Venus and its weather. The spacecraft is equipped with an infrared camera that does not require sunlight.
With this design, the camera cannot capture detailed observations of the nighttime scenery on Venus. However, by using a new analytical method to process the data collected by the camera, researchers can indirectly “see” the elusive nighttime weather of Venus.
Co-author of the study, Takeshi Imamura – a professor at the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences at the University of Tokyo, stated: “Small-scale cloud patterns in direct images are often faint and indistinguishable from the surrounding noise.”
