The second Venus flyby of BepiColombo mission reveals stable atmosphere over decades

Jörn Helbert; Rainer Haus; Gabriele Arnold; Mario D'Amore; Alessandro Maturilli; Thomas Säuberlich; Harald Hiesinger

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-43888-7

The second Venus flyby of BepiColombo mission reveals stable atmosphere over decades

Nat Commun. 2023 Dec 12;14(1):8225. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-43888-7.

Authors

Jörn Helbert¹, Rainer Haus², Gabriele Arnold^{2

3}, Mario D'Amore², Alessandro Maturilli², Thomas Säuberlich⁴, Harald Hiesinger⁵

Affiliations

¹ German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Planetary Research, Rutherfordstrasse 2, 12489, Berlin, Germany. joern.helbert@dlr.de.
² German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Planetary Research, Rutherfordstrasse 2, 12489, Berlin, Germany.
³ University Potsdam, Institute of Geoscience, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 27, 14476, Potsdam, Germany.
⁴ German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Optical Sensorsystems, Rutherfordstrasse 2, 12489, Berlin, Germany.
⁵ University Muenster, Institute of Planetology, Wilhelm-Klemm-Str. 10, 48149, Muenster, Germany.

Abstract

Studies of the Venusian mesosphere provide important information about the current state of the entire Venusian atmosphere. This includes information about the dense cloud structure, its vertical thermal profile, temperature fields, and the resulting dynamical and meteorological processes that contribute to a deeper understanding of the climatologically different evolutionary paths of Earth and Venus. However, the last measurements were acquired in 1983 during Venera-15 mission. In this paper, results of mid-infrared spectral measurements of the Venusian atmosphere are presented. Here we show Mercury Radiometer and Thermal Infrared Spectrometer (MERTIS) measurements of the Venusian atmosphere during the second flyby of BepiColombo mission on its way to Mercury. Our Venus measurements provide reliable retrievals of mesospheric temperature profiles and cloud parameters between 60 and 75 km altitude, although MERTIS was only designed to operate in Mercury environment. Our results are in good agreement with the Venera-15 mission findings. This indicates the stability of the Venusian atmosphere on time scales of decades.