Akatsuki – Japanese Venus Climate Orbiter & IDAS Venus Filters
After the failure of inserting Akatsuki (=meaning “dawn”) into the orbit of the Venus 5 years ago, the next attempt came this week. And it was successfully made this time. It must have been tremendous efforts by JAXA. Now Akatsuki starts sending several interesting images to us. Click below to see the details and images.
What I was interested in was Akatsuki uses similar bandpass filters to the ones IDAS designed and some of wavelength allows to somehow capture with commercially available cameras in the market.
see IDAS and JAXA sites.
IDAS VW-1
This looks similar to Akatsuki’s IR1 camera’s bandpass, which allows to go deep inside while penetrating through several different cloud layers.
IDAS UV372-80
This looks close to their 365nm UVI bandpass for capturing the outer cloud surfaces.
JAXA’s technical notes encourage me to challenge pointing to Venus. Yes, I need large and long telescope. That’s the headache. Recently I had the severe back injury. So I’m now more hesitating to handle a big scope and mount. Even EM200 seems to be too heavy to lift up at this moment. Anyway, I’m very curious of Venus faces – generally not shown well to us.
I’m sure Akatsuki will show us many new Venus faces time to time. I’m looking forward to them.
DigiBorg 