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26 February 2021, 5:13 am EST By Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR instrument, short for Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. ( Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher )
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has finally released the stunning image captured by the space agency s Parker Solar Probe, and a spacecraft sent to study our host star.
Solar Probe Captures Venus
In a blog post published by NASA, the space agency explained the importance of the unique planet in our solar system, saying that it s vital for making sure the solar probe can fly further to the Sun and capture some details that o
This New Image of Venus Shouldn t Actually Exist
Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher
A recent flyby of Venus by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has resulted in an unexpectedly good image of the scorched planet, along with the revelation of a previously unknown capacity for one of the spacecraft’s instruments.
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The Parker Solar Probe mission, launched in 2018, has nothing to do with Venus. The NASA spacecraft is merely using the planet’s gravity to get closer to its real target: the Sun. Eventually, after several more flybys of Venus, the Parker probe will come to within 4.3 million miles (6.9 million km) of our host star. The primary goal of the mission, expected to last until 2025, is to better understand the Sun’s solar winds and corona.
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