EnVision

Radar products for Venus surface change detection

ESA’s EnVision mission will study Venus’s history, climate and activity © ESA

ESA’s EnVision and NASA’s VERITAS missions will study the surface and interior of Venus, to understand the sources and the timeline of the planet’s extreme climate conditions. Such findings will give valuable information on the Earth’s environment and climate, and will help address why the most Earth-like planet of the solar system evolved into its present hostile state.

The main goal of this PhD research is to design the building blocks of an Open Source Toolkit to address the future needs of both missions. To do so, new methodologies and algorithms will be developed to perform an automated surface change detection analysis of repeated SAR images, involving those acquired 30 years ago by the Magellan mission and the radar products of the upcoming missions.

The project will carry out a simulation of future VenSAR imagery; it will analyse how the differences in the design and observation parameters of the different radar sensors might shape the tools performance; and it will address the robust integration of the different EnVision datasets for the purpose of change detection and geomorphology.

This project is co-funded by the ESA OSIP programme.

isardSAT will offer its guidance and support to the research tasks.

More information

Team

Imperial College London, Royal Holloway University, ESA, isardSAT

Duration

2023-2027

Tags

algorithm development, altimetry