Venus orbiter to fly close to super-rotating wind

Venus orbiter to fly close to super-rotating wind

www.newscientist.com

The Venus Climate Orbiter, called AKATSUKI, aims to find out why blistering winds zip around the planet at speeds of up to 400 kilometres per hour. The upper clouds can circle the planet in four days or even less, and no one knows why. The effect is called "super-rotation", because the bulk of the atmosphere is rotating much faster than the planet itself. Venus takes 243 Earth days to make one rotation.

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I've always wondered about Venus' slow rotation much more than the high wind speeds. Maybe the rotation has something to do with it? This might also help shed more light on other planets with high wind speeds such as Jupiter. I'd also like to see the pictures they're going to take, the ones they take of the sun are just amazing.

www.newscientist.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by Estharik


These high velocity air flows on Venus, like the Earth’s jet stream, are caused by a process called the Channelized Air Effect (CAE). I attempt to explain this in my paper (The Tornado and The Channelized Air Effect) which can be found here on ATS.

(www.abovetopsecret.com...)

Venus is one of my favorite planets of topic! serious amateur astronomer here. When was this spacecraft launched? i never heard of it.
venus does rotate in 243 days,a nd yes the winds take its clouds about 4 days to circle. Venus also rotates retrograde, meaning the sun rises in the west, and sets in the east.
What i wish they would do, is send a new generation of VEnera spacecraft. the reason..to take real time phots of its surface. Not one spacecraft lander has ever survived over 2 hours on its surface, due to the imience pressure thier. Venus's atmospheric pressure, is 90 times that of earth...a human would be crushed like a can. thats what happened to the venera spacecrafts. The imgaes taken, were pointed down, and only in some photos, can you actually see in color! the sky thier. would be very cool to send an expendable spacecraft, kinda like Huygens probe with updated cameras to see it all for what it really is!
Last spacecraft too technically see its sruface, was Magellan, in 1990, but that was with radar*