PDS4 CERTIFIED
                                                  


    Description

    The Orbiter Turbulence Experiment (OTUR) used the existing S- and X-band radio system on the Pioneer Venus Orbiter to study scintillations in the radio signals as they passed through the atmosphere and ionosphere before and after occultations. The goal was to study the global distribution of turbulence in the atmosphere.

    The objective of the experiment was to measure the intensity variation of turbulence with (1) altitude, (2) planetary latitude and longitude, and (3) the distribution of scale sizes in the atmosphere. The experiment was designed to observe turbulence of scale sizes smaller than 10 km in the Venus atmosphere above 34 km.

    The resulting dataset contains radio occultation atmospheric turbulence data acquired by the OTUR. The data are time series of received signal amplitude, with time constants chosen to resolve the very rapid amplitude fluctuations associated with radio scintillations caused by temperature fluctuation/turbulence in Venus’ atmosphere. There are seven days of data: 1978-12-13, 1978-12-21, 1978-12-22, 1979-01-07, 1979-01-18, 1979-01-28, and 1979-02-05.

    Documentation is available in the OTUR bundle.

    References

    Colin, L. and D. M. Hunten, Pioneer Venus experiment descriptions, Space Sci. Rev., 20, No. 4, 451-525, doi:10.1007/BF02186463, June 1977.

    Woo, R., et al., Solar wind interactions with the ionosphere of Venus inferred from radio scintillation measurements, J. Geophys. Res., 94, No. A2, 1473-1478, doi:10.1029/JA094iA02p01473, Feb. 1989.

    Accessing the Data

    PVO_OTUR Bundle
    PVO_OTUR data
    The data was obtained Day 347, 355 and 356 of 1978 and Day 7, 18, 28 and 36 of 1979.

    Citation

    PDS recommendations for citing data sets can be found here.

    Won, Y.-I., R.T. Woo, and J.W. Armstrong. (2026) Pioneer Venus Orbiter Atmospheric Turbulence Radio Occultation Data Bundle, NASA Planetary Data System, https://www.doi.org/10.17189/jc8x-bg52