The NASA Parker Solar Probe today made its final dance around Venus, placing itself on a trajectory for an unprecedented approach to the sun, 3.8 million miles from the surface of the star. That is the latest step in a series of flybys of the spacecraft with Venus, the seventh and final encounter under which the gravitational pull of the planet will steer it closer to the sun than anything human has ever gone.
This is a monumental achievement for mankind,” said Nour Raouafi, project scientist for the mission at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Referencing the magisterial moon landing of 1969, he said comparing the approaching spacecraft will make it one-up on the famous space event. Launched in 2018, the car-sized Parker Solar Probe has embarked on a bold mission to “touch” the sun. The mission is built on hope from scientists to unlock mysteries surrounding the corona, an outer atmosphere of the sun that inexplicably gets hotter the farther it is from the sun’s surface.
Thus far, gravity assists from Venus have formed an important part of the trajectory of the Parker probe — employing Venus’s gravitational force to decrease its orbital energy and bring it incrementally closer to the sun. Today’s flyby, dubbed Venus 7, is an important step toward locking in the closest planned approach to the sun, scheduled for December 24.
Though designed basically to study the sun, over time Parker has even gathered valuable data about Venus itself, during close passes.
Earlier this month, the Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, on the probe snapped unexpected details beneath dense clouds of Venus, imaged surface features, and captured the faint heat glow from the scorching nightside of the planet. Today’s pass, bringing the probe within 233 miles of Venus’ surface, should yield additional information about the topography of the planet and surface chemistry.
This is when Parker will reach an astounding speed of 430,000 miles per hour as it approaches the closest point to the sun’s visible surface on December 24. There will be no communication with mission control during this period, as it waits expectantly for a signal on December 27 that could confirm Parker’s successful pass and health while it continues its mission to unlock the secrets of the sun.
