Department of Earth Sciences

The NASA mission VERITAS is planned to launch to Venus in the next decade and will carry the Venus Emissivity Mapper (VEM). The instrument will map the surface of Venus in narrow spectral windows where the Venus atmosphere is more transparent and would allow us to distinguish major rock types such as basalt and granite.  The Freie Universität Berlin will supply the VEM power electronics, develop radiative transfer models that are used to derive surface emissivity from the VEM data and model its uncertainty based on instrument performance, and supports the planning of operations and the instrument calibration.