Venus shifts gear: Scientists puzzle as planet is found to be spinning slower than it should

Daily Mail, by ROB WAUGH, 16th February 2012

 

The Venus Express spacecraft has peered through the crushing and poisonous atmosphere of the planet, and found that it's spinning slower than expected.

Using the orbiter's VIRTIS spectrograph at infrared wavelengths, to penetrate the thick cloud cover, scientists studied surface features and discovered that some were more than 10 miles from where they should be.

The length of Venus's day is 6.5 minutes shorter than previously thought. The discovery could help scientists understand the forces at work on the hostile planet, and plan missions to its surface.

The Venus Express orbiter used its VIRTIS spectrograph at infrared
 frequencies to measure the position of features on the surface - and found
that the planet was spinning more slowly than expected

The Venus Express orbiter's measurements found that the planet's day
is just over six minutes longer than thought

These detailed measurements from orbit are helping scientists determine whether Venus has a solid or liquid core, which will help our understanding of the planet’s creation and how it evolved. 

The orbit could be being affected by Venus's dense atmosphere – more than 90 times the pressure of Earth’s and high-speed weather systems, which are believed to change the planet’s rotation rate through friction with the surface.

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Earth experiences a similar effect, where it is largely caused by wind and tides. The length of an Earth day can change by roughly a millisecond and depends seasonally with wind patterns and temperatures over the course of a year.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Venera and Magellan orbiters made radar maps of the surface of Venus, long shrouded in mystery as well as a dense, crushing and poisonous atmosphere. These maps gave us our first detailed global view of this unique and hostile world.

Topographic maps from the Magellan and Venus Express spacecraft
clearly show that features on the surface have 'shifted'

Over its four-year mission, Magellan was able to watch features rotate under the spacecraft, allowing scientists to determine the length of the day on Venus as being equal to 243.0185 Earth days.

However, surface features seen by Venus Express some 16 years later could only be lined up with those observed by Magellan if the length of the Venus day is on average 6.5 minutes longer than Magellan measured.

This also agrees with the most recent long-duration radar measurements from Earth.

Then the two maps did not align, I first thought there was a mistake in my calculations as Magellan measured the value very accurately, but we have checked every possible error we could think of, said Nils Müller, a planetary scientist at the DLR German Aerospace Centre, lead author of a research paper investigating the rotation.

Scientists, including Özgur Karatekin of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, looked at the possibility of short-term random variations in the length of a Venus day, but concluded these should average themselves out over longer timescales.

On the other hand, other recent atmospheric models have shown that the planet could have weather cycles stretching over decades, which could lead to equally long-term changes in the rotation period. Other effects could also be at work, including exchanges of angular momentum between Venus and the Earth when the two planets are relatively close to each other.

An accurate value for Venus’ rotation rate will help in planning future missions, because precise information will be needed to select potential landing sites, noted Håkan Svedhem, ESA’s Venus Express project scientist.

While further study is needed, it’s clear that Venus Express is penetrating far deeper into the mysteries of this enigmatic planet then anyone dreamed.

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