The Venus Express exploration mission of European Space Agency continues to provide all of us with eerie findings on the Earth-like activities the second planet from the sun still possesses, four and a half billion years after it was ravaged by greenhouse effect.

According to the latest findings, lightning still flashes in Venus' atmosphere as remnants of its ocean continue to be whirled around the planet and are sometimes thrown out in space. More on this after the jump!

The series of images you see above are that of Venus taken by VIRTIS aboard the Venus Express in February of this year. The mission has so far orbited the planet for 500 days, and has even more exciting surprises up its sleeves.

Quite a number of interesting data have been found, such as that the Earth's twin planet's atmosphere "seems extremely fickle." Hmmm... maybe there really is basis for affiliating the planet with women. That image above appears to corroborate that statement as various cloud activities can be seen in a matter of 10 consecutive Earth days taken in eight orbits.

Thanks to the Venus Express, about 1 Terabits (one million million bits) worth of data have been sent back to Earth, and we can definitely expect more. It has been reported that the Venus Express is doing much better than its twin spacecraft, the Mars Express, despite the challenging environment it is on.

The European Space Agency's Venus Express, which has completed its first orbit around the stunning planet, has confirmed the presence of a huge 'double-eye' atmospheric vortex at Venus' south pole. The spacecraft's infrared, visible and ultraviolet images of the Venusian globe, revealed several interesting atmospheric vortices. But the spotlight is definitely on the huge, double-eye atmospheric vortex broiling over the south pole. The southern vortex is similar from its counterpart at the north pole which had been previously studied in some detail.

The vortex is formed by high velocity winds spinning westwards around the planet and takes four days to complete a rotation combined with the natural recycling of hot air in the atmosphere.

"We still know very little about the mechanisms by which the super-rotation and the polar vortexes are linked," said Hakan Svedhem, ESA’s Venus Express Project Scientist. "Also, we are still not able to explain why the global atmospheric circulation of the planet results in a double and not single vortex formation at the poles. However the mission is just at the beginning and it's doing fine; we expect this and many other long-standing mysteries to be addressed and possibly solved by Venus Express,"

Atmospheric vortices are very complex structures that are very difficult to model, even on Earth. But the first pictures made it possible to observe the presence of a collar of cold air around the vortex structure, possibly due to the recycling of cold air downwards.

The preliminary data about the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere were also recorded - mainly carbon dioxide (CO#@%!23
24#@%!) which is broken into molecule into carbon monoxide and oxygen in the upper atmospheric layers by the solar radiation. Venus Express spotted the presence of an oxygen airglow high in the atmosphere and carbon monoxide as low as the cloud-layer top. The data analysis and retrieval will continue as scientists seek to understand the phenomenon the complex chemical processes and cycles at work in the Venusian caused by the influence of solar radiation.