Introduction. The Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC)
onboard Venus Express takes images in 4 channels, one of
which is centered at 1.01 μm. When the camera looks at
the night side of Venus, this channel registers thermal
emission from the planet surface from mid-southern to
mid-northern latitudes [1]. Due to scattering of the emitted
radiation in the atmosphere and the cloud layer, the effective
spatial resolution in the surface images is ~50 km.
Thus, modeling the atmospheric blurring is essential for
this work. Here we report results of preliminary analysis of
some VMC 1-μm images.
Intensity of the surface thermal emission at 1 μm depends
strongly on its temperature and thus on surface elevation
as well as on surface emissivity and cloud opacity.
But emissivity of the surface material depends also on
surface texture and mineralogy so the image analysis can
provide an information on these parameters. Also, if there
is an ongoing volcanic eruption in the camera field of
view, it might be noticed on the images