Venus Express: Results of the Nominal Mission

More than 25 spacecraft from the United States and the Soviet Union visited Venus in the 20th century, but in spite of the many successful measurements they made, a great number of fundamental problems in the physics of the planet remained unsolved. Venus Express continues and extends the investigations of earlier missions by providing detailed monitoring of processes and phenomena in the atmosphere and near-space environment of Venus. Radio, solar, and stellar occultation, together with thermal emission spectroscopy, sound the atmospheric structure in the altitude range from 150 to 40 km with vertical resolution of few hundred meters, revealing strong temperature variations driven by radiation and dynamical processes.This book contains original papers describing results and analysis of the observations during the whole nominal mission (4 June 2006 to 2 October 2007), along with supporting modeling efforts. The papers are grouped in topical blocks: atmospheric composition, atmospheric dynamics, non-LTE emissions, surface investigations, atmospheric structure, clouds and hazes, and plasma environment.