Solar Orbiter Captures The Other Side Of The Planet Venus Closer

JAKARTA - The ESA and NASA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft passes within 4,967 miles from the surface of the planet Venus. In the days leading up to the approach, the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, or SoloHI telescope captured a glimpse of this sparkling planet.

The interesting images combined into a video were taken on August 9, showing Venus approaching from the left while the Sun is on the right. At that time Venus was in the night time, visible half a dark circle surrounded by the light of a bright crescent moon.

"Ideally, we could resolve some features on the night side of the planet, but there are too many signals from the daytime," said astrophysicist Phillip Hess at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.

Two bright stars are also visible on the planet, the far right is Omicron Tauri, and to the left is Xi Tauri, which is actually a quadruple star system. Both are part of the constellation Taurus.

Solar Orbiter uses Venus' gravity to pull it closer to the Sun and tilt its orbit. From this vantage point, Solar Orbiter will finally capture the first images of the Sun's north and south poles. It is known that Venus is too shiny, reflecting about 75 percent of the sunlight that hits it. This is the second Venus Solar Orbiter flyby mission, the first Earth flyby in November 2021 and six more Venus flybys planned from 2022 to 2030. On August 10, just one day later, ESA's BepiColombo mission and the Japan Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) also flew. through Venus.

Using NASA's Parker Solar Probe spacecraft and ESA's Mercury probe BepiColombo have also taken close-up images of Venus during gravity-assisted flybys.

During that mission, the spacecraft reported new volcanic activity, and strange molecules in the planet's atmosphere, making it look even more interesting. Currently, only one vehicle is currently active on Venus, namely, Japan's Akatsuki.

As such, flybys provide an opportunity to collect additional data with a different set of instruments than Venus. This approach has provided some very interesting information.

The Parker spacecraft, for example, detected surface features through Venus' thick cloud layers, a fact that could open up several new observation possibilities. On another flyby, Parker detected radio emissions from Venus, the first recorded in three decades, allowing new insights into how the Sun's cycle affects the planet's atmosphere.