The site of the Euro Venus European project - http://www.eurovenus.eu is now on line!
Set up by the Laboratory for space research and astrophysical instrumentation (Laboratoire d’études spatiales et d’instrumentation en astrophysique) of the Paris Observatory, the purpose of this site is to inform the numerous interested parties about the nature, the scientific activites and the results of the European consortium EuroVenus.
The site has a full description of the reasons for exploring and studying scientifically the planet Venus, both from space and from the ground.
The site presents:
- the work of the scientific teams
- the results of the consortium
- the state of the space exploration projects: both current - the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Venus Express – and future ones
It also has links towards the European partner institutes and teams.
Finally, it puts at the disposal of the general public the wherewithal for the dissemination of information.
The EuroVenus European consortium
EuroVenus is a 2.2 M€. project financed by the European Commision.
Programmed to last for 3 years (Oct. 2013 - Sep. 2016), it is coordinated by the Paris Observatory.
EuroVenus includes the exploitation of data from the Venus Express space mission, and the interpretation of observations made with ground based telescopes (CFHT, ALMA, IRTF).
It emphasizes the planet’s climatology, through a mapping of the winds, the chemical species, the cloud formations and the temperature. Just as in the case of the most detailed terrestrial climatological research, our understanding Venus advances through the acquisition of long duration time series measurements of atmospheric conditions as well as their spatial and temporal variations, with a view to doing comparative climatology.
It includes planetologists from LESIA at the Paris Observatory, from LAGRANGE at the Côte d’Azur Observatory, from the Belgian Space Aeronomy Institute, from the Cologne Rhenan Institute for the study of the environment, from the Lisbon University Physics faculty and the Centre for Astronomy and Astgrophysics, and from Oxford University.
Five scientists from LESIA are involved: T. Widemann, T. Encrenaz, R. Moreno, E. Lellouch, and A. Piccialli.