Venus Express Status Report - May 2007
Operations and Archiving
Payload operations continue to run well, and minor improvements in the mission planning and constraint checking software continue to be made. A large amount of effort was invested in planning the next 'quadrature' period - a period where an Earth pointed attitude (e.g. for downlink) could violate an illumination constraint for the VMC. Planning around this, although technically not too complicated, requires careful preparation.
A successful science team meeting, combined with a Venus science workshop, was held at La Thuile 19-23 March 2007. One of the topics discussed was a potential future orbit change to allow for new types of observations.
Some delays have been encountered in the data deliveries for ingestion to the archive, but a first release of (a subset of) Venus Express data in the Planetary Science Archive (PSA) is still expected for this summer.
Science Highlights
A very good session on Venus Express results was held on 17 April 2007 at the EGU meeting in Vienna.
The preparations for a special section on Venus Express results (some 9 papers), to be published in Nature, are ongoing.