The Planetary Society of Japan : Column

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November 25, 2009

To Venus together! -----Getting close to deadline of “AKATSUKI” campaign-----

Do you know that the Venus Climate Orbiter PLANET-C was nicknamed “AKATSUKI”? Since after Pluto was disqualified as a planet to have reduced the number of planets belonging to Solar system to eight, Venus is a special planet. Why? Because Venus is the most familiar star to us Japanese except moon ever since the early times. There is no other star so elegantly nicknamed as “the morning star” or “the evening star”.

The size and mass weight is very close to that of earth and its orbital average distance is closer to earth than that of Mars. It is believed that Venus couldn’t have ocean due to its closeness to sun. It is now a sunbaked planet quite different from earth because of runaway greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide that takes most part of Venus atmosphere.

As viewed from the north pole, all other planets including earth are rotating counterclockwise (from west to east) while Venus alone is rotating very slowly in the opposite way. I just can’t say a careless remark here, but a science fiction novel attributes its reason to the impact collision of some gigantic celestial body to Venus in primitive age. (“Worlds in Collision” by Velikovsky)

Besides in Venus, very strong east wind called “super rotation” is rolling over the entire surface while the planet itself is rotating very slowly. It is really a strange phenomenon. The wind is storm sweeping sixty times as fast as rotation velocity. “AKATSUKI” scheduled to be launched by JAXA next year is to close in to Venus to clarify most mysterious meteorological problem of super rotation of Venus.

“AKATSUKI” is an ambitious mission to establish a new academic world of “planetary meteorology”. How about “ride” the orbiter? Eh? How can I ride it? You can ride the orbiter by sending your names and messages as you did at the time of “KAGUYA”, “HAYABUSA” and “NOZOMI” to let the spaceship carry them to Venus. As a matter of fact, I should have let you know of this campaign much earlier. I’m sorry it’s a little delayed. But you can still make it by the deadline. Please actively participate in the campaign by calling on your families, friends and company people. Please refer to its details as below.
http://www.jaxa.jp/event/akatsuki/index_j.html

I welcome your comments on this column to the following E-mail address.
matogawa@planetary.or.jp

(Translated by The Planetary Society of Japan)