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Antonio Genova
Public Documents
1
Determination of Venus' interior structure with EnVision
Pascal Rosenblatt
and 3 more
March 10, 2021
The Venusian geological features are poorly gravity-resolved and the state of the core is not well constrained, preventing to understand Venus’ cooling history. The EnVision candidate mission to the ESA’s Cosmic Vision Programme consists of a low-altitude orbiter to investigate geological and atmospheric processes. The gravity experiment aboard this mission aims to determine Venus’ geophysical parameters to fully characterize its internal structure. By analyzing the radio-tracking data that will be acquired through daily operations over six Venusian days (four Earth’s years), we will derive a highly-accurate gravity field (spatial resolution better than ~170 km), allowing to detect lateral variations of the lithosphere and crust properties beneath most of the geological features. The expected 0.3% error on the Love number k2, 0.1° error on the tidal phase lag and 1.4% error on the moment of inertia are fundamental to constrain the core size and state as well as the mantle viscosity.