Video: Solar Orbiter records Venus less than 8000 km away

Posted:

13 before 2021 09:01 GMT

NASA and the European Space Agency have taken this approach to take advantage of the planet’s gravitational momentum and adjust its path toward the sun.

space probe solar orbit NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) event on Monday to 7995 km from the surface of Venus.

The purpose of the maneuver was to take advantage of the planet’s gravity to accelerate the spacecraft and adjust its course toward the sun. The camera recorded the approaching device. In the images, the night part of Venus can be seen as a dark semicircle surrounded by the sunlit part of the planet, which appears as a half-moon.

“Ideally we could resolve some features on the night side of the planet, but there were a lot of signals from the day side. Only a diurnal sidebar appears in the images, but it reflects enough sunlight to make a bright crescent and deflect rays. That seems to be come from the surface”, Date NASA statement by astrophysicist Philip Hess.

The Solar Orbiter, launched in February 2019, weighs just under two tons and has a maximum dimension of 3 metres, not counting the solar panels. Its ten scientific instruments on board seek to provide an answer to that how to arise How does the solar wind accelerate and what is the origin of the magnetic field that determines activity sessions Solar perception on our planet, as well as other scientific questions. Last June, she survived her first close encounter with the Sun by passing 77 million km From its surface, half the distance between the star and our planet.

Also, this Tuesday, another space probe, the European-Japanese BepiColombojust get close 552 km Venus. Like the solar orbiter, it used the second planet in the solar system as a “stepping stone” to reach its mission target, Mercury, over which it flew for the first time in early October. The European Space Agency (ESA) has published a photograph of the approach it has taken 1,573 kilometers from the planet.

He is a plan That BepiColombo arrives at Mercury at the end of 2025 and that a year later the two orbits it carries on board began collecting data from this planet, which, according to agency specialists, “contains important clues about the formation and evolution of the entire solar system.”