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By NASA
4 min read
Final Venus Flyby for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Queues Closest Sun Pass
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will complete its final Venus gravity assist maneuver, passing within 233 miles (376 km) of Venus’ surface. The flyby will adjust Parker’s trajectory into its final orbital configuration, bringing the spacecraft to within an unprecedented 3.86 million miles of the solar surface on Dec. 24, 2024. It will be the closest any human made object has been to the Sun.
Parker’s Venus flybys have become boons for new Venus science thanks to a chance discovery from its Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR. The instrument peers out from Parker and away from the Sun to see fine details in the solar wind. But on July 11, 2020, during Parker’s third Venus flyby, scientists turned WISPR toward Venus in hopes of tracking changes in the planet’s thick cloud cover. The images revealed a surprise: A portion of WISPR’s data, which captures visible and near infrared light, seemed to see all the way through the clouds to the Venusian surface below.
“The WISPR cameras can see through the clouds to the surface of Venus, which glows in the near-infrared because it’s so hot,” said Noam Izenberg, a space scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Venus, sizzling at approximately 869 degrees Fahrenheit (about 465 C), was radiating through the clouds.
The WISPR images from the 2020 flyby, as well as the next flyby in 2021, revealed Venus’ surface in a new light. But they also raised puzzling questions, and scientists have devised the Nov. 6 flyby to help answer them.
Left: A series of WISPR images of the nightside of Venus from Parker Solar Probe’s fourth flyby showing near infrared emissions from the surface. In these images, lighter shades represent warmer temperatures and darker shades represent cooler. Right: A combined mosaic of radar images of Venus’ surface from NASA’s Magellan mission, where the brightness indicates radar properties from smooth (dark) to rough (light), and the colors indicate elevation from low (blue) to high (red). The Venus images correspond well with data from the Magellan spacecraft, showing dark and light patterns that line up with surface regions Magellan captured when it mapped Venus’ surface using radar from 1990 to 1994. Yet some parts of the WISPR images appear brighter than expected, hinting at extra information captured by WISPR’s data. Is WISPR picking up on chemical differences on the surface, where the ground is made of different material? Perhaps it’s seeing variations in age, where more recent lava flows added a fresh coat to the Venusian surface.
“Because it flies over a number of similar and different landforms than the previous Venus flybys, the Nov. 6 flyby will give us more context to evaluate whether WISPR can help us distinguish physical or even chemical properties of Venus’ surface,” Izenberg said.
After the Nov. 6 flyby, Parker will be on course to swoop within 3.8 million miles of the solar surface, the final objective of the historic mission first conceived over 65 years ago. No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker’s data will be charting as-yet uncharted territory. In this hyper-close regime, Parker will cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the Sun. It is close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave.
“This is a major engineering accomplishment,” said Adam Szabo, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, will occur on Dec. 24, 2024, during which mission control will be out of contact with the spacecraft. Parker will send a beacon tone on Dec. 27, 2024, to confirm its success and the spacecraft’s health. Parker will remain in this orbit for the remainder of its mission, completing two more perihelia at the same distance.
Parker Solar Probe is part of NASA’s Living with a Star program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The Living with a Star program is managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, manages the Parker Solar Probe mission for NASA and designed, built, and operates the spacecraft.
By Miles Hatfield
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 04, 2024 Related Terms
Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Heliophysics Division Parker Solar Probe (PSP) Solar Wind The Sun Venus Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:01:25 Watch the closest flyby of a planet ever, as the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft sped past Mercury during its latest encounter on 4 September 2024.
This flyby marked BepiColombo’s closest approach to Mercury yet, and for the first time, the spacecraft had a clear view of Mercury’s south pole.
This timelapse is made up of 128 different images captured by all three of BepiColombo’s monitoring cameras, M-CAM 1, 2 and 3. We see the planet move in and out of the fields of view of M-CAM 2 and 3, before M-CAM 1 sees the planet receding into the distance at the end of the video.
The first few images are taken in the days and weeks before the flyby. Mercury first appears in an image taken at 23:50 CEST (21:50 UTC) on 4 September, at a distance of 191 km. Closest approach was at 23:48 CEST at a distance of 165 km.
The sequence ends around 24 hours later, on 5 September 2024, when BepiColombo was about 243 000 km from Mercury.
During the flyby it was possible to identify various geological features that BepiColombo will study in more detail once in orbit around the planet. Four minutes after closest approach, a large ‘peak ring basin’ called Vivaldi came into view.
This crater was named after the famous Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). The flyover of Vivaldi crater was the inspiration for using Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ as the soundtrack for this timelapse.
Peak ring basins are mysterious craters created by powerful asteroid or comet impacts, so-called because of the inner ring of peaks on an otherwise flattish floor.
A couple of minutes later, another peak ring basin came into view: newly named Stoddart. The name was recently assigned following a request from the M-CAM team, who realised that this crater would be visible in these images and decided it would be worth naming considering its potential interest for scientists in the future.
BepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras provided 1024 x 1024 pixel snapshots. Their main purpose is to monitor the spacecraft’s various booms and antennas, hence why we see parts of the spacecraft in the foreground. The photos that they capture of Mercury during the flybys are a bonus.
The 4 September gravity assist flyby was the fourth at Mercury and the seventh of nine planetary flybys overall. During its eight-year cruise to the smallest and innermost planet of the Solar System, BepiColombo makes one flyby at Earth, two at Venus and six at Mercury, to help steer itself on course for entering orbit around Mercury in 2026.
BepiColombo is an international collaboration between ESA and JAXA.
BepiColombo’s best images yet highlight fourth Mercury flyby
BepiColombo images in ESA’s Planetary Science Archive
Processing notes: The BepiColombo monitoring cameras provide black-and-white, 1024 x 1024 pixel images. These raw images have been processed to remove electronic banding in the cameras. The M-CAM 1 images have been cropped to 995 x 995 pixels
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By European Space Agency
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has successfully completed its fourth of six gravity assist flybys at Mercury, capturing images of two special impact craters as it uses the little planet’s gravity to steer itself on course to enter orbit around Mercury in November 2026.
The closest approach took place at 23:48 CEST (21:48 UTC) on 4 September 2024, with BepiColombo coming down to around 165 km above the planet’s surface. For the first time, the spacecraft had a clear view of Mercury’s south pole.
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By European Space Agency
Teams from across ESA and industry have worked continuously over the past four months to overcome a glitch that prevented BepiColombo’s thrusters from operating at full power. The ESA/JAXA mission is still on track, with a new trajectory that will take it just 165 km from Mercury’s surface on Wednesday.
Taking BepiColombo closer to Mercury than it’s ever been before, this flyby will reduce the spacecraft’s speed and change its direction. It also gives us the opportunity to snap images and fine-tune science instrument operations at Mercury before the main mission begins. Closest approach is scheduled for 23:48 CEST (21:48 UTC) on 4 September.
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