Venera : Venus Planetary Radar Astronomy

Writeup of results: Amateur Estimates of the Rotational Elements of Venus using 32 years of Arecibo Planetary Radar

Doppler-Delay Image Processing

Planetary Radar Astronomy is the use of active radar to map celestial bodies (the Moon, planets, asteroids). From 1988 to 2020, Arecibo intermittently mapped Venus, with data archived here (citation: Bruce A. Campbell and Donald B. Campbell 2022 Planet. Sci. J. 3 55, doi:10.3847/PSJ/ac4f43.).

The code in this repository is an exploration in processing this data, projecting it into Venus global coordinates, and combining multiple observations into videos or super-resolution images.

WORK IN PROGRESS -- the code is still under development, and has been hacked up to produce various outputs.

• Use wget_venus_data.sh to download data, for example wget_venus_data.sh ocp_2015 to get all the OCP imgs from 2015.
• Use process_radar_images.ipynb to do processing (or use parallel_process_radar_images.sh to run it in parallel -- but you need a lot of memory!)
• Use process_video.ipynb to assemble videos.

Preliminary Data Products

• High res projected videos (Google Drive)
  • Example: Cumulative average, 1988-2020 2000x2000 (5 MB)
• Super-resolution projected photos (Google Drive)
  • Example: All 2015 observations combined (118 MB)

Note: due to observational constraints, all observations are basically from one hemisphere of Venus (the side closest to the Earth at nearest approach).

Example doppler-delay image: