New images taken by instruments on board ESA's Venus Express provide a unique insight into the windy atmosphere of our neighbouring planet and reveal that global patterns at the Venus cloud tops are the result of variable temperatures and cloud heights.

Venus Express has detected the molecule hydroxyl on another planet for the first time. This detection gives scientists an important new tool to unlock the workings of Venus’s dense atmosphere.

Venus Express has revealed a planet of extraordinarily changeable and extremely large-scale weather. Bright hazes appear in a matter of days, reaching from the south pole to the low southern latitudes and disappearing just as quickly. Such ‘global weather’, unlike anything on Earth, has given scientists a new mystery to solve.

An exciting new series of videos from ESA's Venus Express has been capturing atmospheric details of day and night areas simultaneously, at different altitudes.

One year has passed since 11 April 2006, when Venus Express, Europe's first mission to Venus and the only spacecraft now in orbit around the planet, reached its destination. Since then, this advanced probe, born to explore one of the most mysterious planetary bodies in the Solar System, has been revealing planetary details never caught before.