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The Venus thermal radiation spectrum exhibits the signature of CO 2 absorption bands. By means of inversion techniques, those bands enable the retrieval of atmospheric temperature profiles. We have analyzed VIRTIS-M-IR night-side data obtaining high-resolution thermal maps of the Venus south polar region between 55 and 85km altitudes. This analysis is specific to three Venus Express orbits...
We present a study of the vertical cloud structure for the initial stage of the Great White Spot (GWS), a giant storm that developed in Saturn in December 2010, using ground-based visual images. We focus in the characterization of the undisturbed atmosphere preceding the storm and the disturbed region in the wake of the GWS. The observations were taken at Calar Alto (Spain) and Pic du Midi (France)...
The South Equatorial Belt (SEB) of Jupiter is known to alternate its appearance at visible wavelengths from a classical belt-like band most of the time to a short-lived zone-like aspect which is called a “fade” of the belt, hereafter SEBF. The albedo change of the SEB is due to a change in the structure and properties of the clouds and upper hazes. Recent works based on infrared observations of the...
A study of the vertical cloud structure of oval BA and its red color change is presented in this third part of our complete analysis. A large interest in Jupiter’s anticyclone BA was created by its reddening that occurred between 2005 and 2006. In this work we quantify the color change in oval BA by using images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)...
For a variety of reasons, Jupiter's polar areas are probably the less observed regions of the planet. To study the dynamics and cloud vertical structure in the polar regions of the planet (latitudes 50° to 80° in both hemispheres) we have used images of Jupiter obtained from the ultraviolet to near infrared (258 to 939 nm) by the Cassini Imagining Science Subsystem (ISS) in December 2000. The temporal...
The Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on board the ESA/Venus Express mission has technical specifications well suited for many science objectives of Venus exploration. VIRTIS will both comprehensively explore a plethora of atmospheric properties and processes and map optical properties of the surface through its three channels, VIRTIS-M-vis (imaging spectrometer in the 0.3–1μm...
The global circulation of the Venus atmosphere is characterized at cloud level by a zonal super rotation studied over the years with data from a battery of spacecrafts: orbiters, balloons and probes. Among them, the Galileo spacecraft monitored the Venus atmosphere in a flyby in February 1990 in its route toward Jupiter. Since the flyby was almost equatorial, published analysis of zonal winds obtained...
The three-dimensional structure of Saturn's intense equatorial jet from latitudes 8° N to 20° S is revealed from detailed measurements of the motions and spectral reflectivity of clouds at visible wavelengths on high resolution images obtained by the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) in 2004 and early 2005. Cloud speeds at two altitude levels are measured in the near infrared filters CB2 and...
Saturn's southern pole was observed at high resolution by the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) during the spacecraft insertion orbit in July 2004. Cloud tracking of individual features on images taken at a wavelength of 938 nm reveal the existence of a strong polar vortex enclosed by a jet with maximum speed of 160±10 ms−1 relative to System III rotation frame, and peak at 87 °S planetographic...
In this work, we describe an analysis of the internal solar radiation fields in Saturn's atmosphere. The aim of this paper is to study how the solar radiation flux in optical wavelengths (0.25–1.0 μm) is attenuated, primarily by the effect of the aerosols located close to the tropopause level, retrieving also the corresponding solar heating rates. We use a doubling–adding method and previous results...
In this work we analyze and compare the vertical cloud structure of Saturn's Equatorial Zone in two different epochs: the first one close to the Voyagers flybys (1979–1981) and the second one in 2004, when the Cassini spacecraft entered its orbit around the planet. Our goal is to retrieve the altitude of cloud features used as zonal wind tracers in both epochs. We reanalyze three different sets of...
We present a study of the vertical structure of clouds and hazes in the upper atmosphere of Saturn's Southern Hemisphere during 1994–2003, about one third of a Saturn year, based on Hubble Space Telescope images. The photometrically calibrated WFPC2 images cover the spectral region between the near-UV (218–255 nm) and the near-IR (953–1042 nm), including the 890 nm methane band. Using a radiative...
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