EPSC Abstracts Vol. 11, EPSC2017-771, 2017 European Planetary Science Congress 2017 EEuropeaPn PlanetarSy Science CCongress c Author(s) 2017 CUVE - Cubesat UV Experiment: Unveil Venus’ UV Absorber with Cubesat UV Mapping Spectrometer V. Cottini (1,2), S. Aslam (2), E. D’Aversa (3), L. Glaze (2), N. Gorius (4,2), T. Hewagama (1,2), N. Ignatiev (5) and G. Piccioni (3) (1) University of Maryland, College Park, USA (
[email protected] Fax: +1-301-286-1683), (2) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, USA, (3) INAF-IAPS, Italy, (4) Catholic University of America, USA, (5) IKI RAN, Russia Abstract water. These clouds are the reason for Venus’ high albedo in the visible, where 70-80% of the incoming Our Venus mission concept Cubesat UV Experiment solar radiation is backscattered to space. For this (CUVE) is one of ten proposals selected for funding reason, despite Venus being closer to the Sun than by the NASA PSDS3 Program - Planetary Science Earth, it absorbs a similar quantity of energy to that Deep Space SmallSat Studies. CUVE concept is to absorbed on our home planet. The maximum insert a CubeSat spacecraft into a Venusian orbit and absorption of solar energy by Venus occurs in the perform remote sensing (Fig. 1) of the UV spectral UV where we observe spectral contrast features that region using a high spectral resolution point originate from the non-uniform distribution of spectrometer to resolve UV molecular bands, observe unknown absorbers within its clouds. This opacity nightglow, and characterize the unidentified main source affects the energy balance in the Venusian UV absorber.