Venus Surface Thermal Emission Observed by VIRTIS on Venus Express
نویسندگان
چکیده
The imaging spectrometer VIRTIS is the flight spare of the instrument of the same name on the Rosetta mission. It was refitted to be part of the Venus Express mission orbiting Venus since 2006. VIRTIS can observe nightside thermal emissions at the wavelengths of several atmospheric windows. In three of these windows atmospheric transparency is sufficient to allow a measurable amount of radiation originating from the surface thermal emission to escape [1, 2, 3]. Surface emissivity in this near infrared range is indicative of surface mineralogy, observation of the atmospheric windows presents an opportunity to characterize the surface mineralogy globally [4, 5]. In this study, a signal, that can arguably be attributed to surface emissivity, is isolated from VIRTIS images and mosaiced to create a map encompassing most of the southern hemisphere.
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