Astronomers have recently speculated that our nearest neighbor, Venus, may have been he first habitable planet in the Solar System — “a place where life was just as likely to arise as it was on Earth,” says Darby Dyar, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College with NASA’s Solar System Exploration team.
Coming off its fifth encounter with the Sun in 2020, the NASA’s Parker Solar Probe headed toward Venus, where on July 11, the spacecraft performed its first outbound flyby of Venus, passing approximately 516 miles above the surface as it curved around the planet passing through the planet’s weird “tail” –formed by gas particles in the planet’s atmosphere becoming charged ions, at which point they can escape Venus’ gravity and escape into outer space