Stunning new video from NASA probe captures sunlight on clouds of Venus

Although Venus is described as “our sister planet”, it reveals very little about itself, which has made it a mystery to astronomers until now.

Venus is known to be the most reflective planet in the solar system, which is why it shines very brightly. The recent flyby of the Solar Orbiter of the European Space Agency and the United States Space Agency is excellent proof of this.

On August 9, the probe passed 7,995 kilometers (4,967 miles) from the surface of Venus and performed its second of eight gravitational assist maneuvers to help it gain speed and trajectory relative to gravity. of the planet as it orbits the sun.

Meanwhile, the Solar Orbiter’s imaging instrument on the planet was trained to see if it could capture anything of interest.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

In the days leading up to this approach, the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, or SoloHI, captured a bright view of the planet.

The images show Venus approaching from the left while the Sun is far from the camera in the upper right. The night side of the planet, the hidden part of the sun, appears as a dark semicircle surrounded by a brilliant crescent of light, and shines on the incredibly sunny side of Venus, as it reflects almost 75% of the sunlight. that hits it.

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“Ideally, we would probably be able to resolve some features of the night side of the planet, but there are a lot of signals on the day side,” said Philip Hess, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. The images are, but they reflect enough sunlight to create a bright crescent and diffracted rays that appear to be coming from the surface. “

Two bright stars also appear in the background of the stars of the constellation Taurus, before being obscured by the planet, where the star Omicron Tauri stands out on the far right, and above it on the left is find the star Xi Tauri, which is actually a quadruple star system.

This was the second flight around Venus since the “Solar Orbiter”, and the next flyby of the planet will take place in November 2021, while six more flights around the planet will be carried out from 2022 to 2030.

Source: Scientific alert

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