|
-Photographed when the NASA Parker Solar Probe’s Venus flyby
NASA’s solar probe, Parker Solar Probe, took a stunning picture of Venus on February 20 (local time) while making a fourth swing-by on Venus. NASA’s mission scientists congratulated Parker for completing his fourth Venus flyby by revealing a stunning image of Venus captured during a similar maneuver last July.
The $1.5 billion Parker probe was launched in August 2018 to solve the mystery of solar corona and solar wind.
Parker’s solar exploration is unprecedented boldness, with a total of 24 flybys in close proximity to the sun over the course of seven years, and as the flyby recovery progresses, it gets closer to the sun, eventually reaching 6.16 million kilometers per hour to the sun in 2025. It approaches 10,000 km. This is close enough to be 4% of the approximate 150 million km distance between Earth and Sun.
The reason Parker probes flyby to Venus seven times is to get an orbit that can get closer to the Sun, which means that three more flyby maneuvers remain.
NASA scientists are using Parker’s scientific equipment to make extra-curricular revenues from exploration of Venus, rather than spending these seven flight approaches to Venus. Venus, nicknamed’Earth Twins Resembling Hell’, holds numerous secrets that humanity does not yet know.
On July 11, 2020, the Parker probe performed a third Venus flyby at a distance of 12,380 km from Venus, which means that Venus has a diameter of about 12,100 km, which means that it has swinged back to Venus at an altitude that is about that distance. . During the close maneuver, the mission team activated the spacecraft’s wide-field camera (WISPR) to capture stunning images of Venus.
WISPR is a device designed to capture the solar wind emitted by the sun, the flow of charged particles and the emission of corona mass with visible light images. Therefore, it is not the colorful planetary image we often think of. There are no colors, no complex clouds, no cosmic atmosphere.
But, according to NASA announcements, this is a fascinating appearance of Earth’s neighbor Venus and is an interesting research challenge thrown by scientists. The bright rim of Venus’ edge in the image may be the light emitted when oxygen atoms in the planet’s upper atmosphere combine, which occurs in the planet’s night region, producing luminous light.
Even the streaks across the image are a mystery that has not been completely resolved. Some may be traces of cosmic rays or dust that reflects sunlight, while others may be small particles released from the spacecraft itself due to collisions of cosmic dust.
However, the real highlight is Venus itself, which surprised scientists by showing a completely different look than what scientists expected from WISPR.
“We expected to see clouds, but the camera captured the surface of Venus,” assuming in a statement that “WISPR is custom designed for visible light observation,” said Angelos Volidas, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Physics (APL) WISPR project. Revealed.
In addition, the device also detected differences in the surface temperature of Venus. The dark spot in the center of the planetary image is a huge plateau called Aphrodite Terra. Scientists know that the rocks in this area are about 30 degrees Celsius lower than the surrounding area.
The fact that WISPR has caught this temperature difference may mean that something strange is happening in Venus’ thick atmosphere so that the device can see through the clouds, or that WISPR may be able to capture some near-infrared rays unlike its design.
|
If so, this means that you have new opportunities to observe the sun, the main target of the spacecraft. “Either way, it will be an exciting scientific opportunity,” said Dr. Volidas.
To see what scenarios are in action, WISPR took a similar picture on February 20 at 3:05 PM, the closest time the spacecraft reached within 2400 km of Venus’ surface at Parker Solar Probe’s fourth Venus flyby. However, you have to wait until the end of April to receive this image.
The next milestone for the Parker probe is the solar flyby on April 29, and the next close flight to Venus is scheduled for October 16.
The Parker solar probe is equipped with four observational devices, which collect as much data as possible to unravel the anomalous high-temperature mystery of the solar corona, which is the sun’s internal activity and the high-speed causes of the solar wind, and finally, hundreds of times the solar surface temperature. Will be collected.
Kwang-Sik Lee Columnist [email protected]
–
