Views of flyovers of Venus captured during two close encounters

Venus has been a hotspot in the solar system this week, as two different missions captured footage of their flights over the planet. Solar Orbiter, a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), as well as BepiColombo, a joint project between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), both performed overflights of the planet to increase the gravity of their way to their Sun and Mercury destinations respectively.

Solar Orbiter approached 4,967 miles (7,995 kilometers) from Venus on Monday, August 9, capturing its approach using its Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) instrument. SoloHI is designed to image the solar wind, not to capture planetary flyovers, but the researchers running the project wanted to take every chance they had to collect data on our solar system.

They managed to capture Venus on approach, moving from left to right as the sun is on the right. The dark circle of the planet is its nocturnal face, opposite the sun, which appears black compared to the brilliant glow of its diurnal face, which faces the sun.

“Ideally, we could have solved some features on the night side of the planet, but there was just too much signal on the day side,” said Phillip Hess, astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. daylight appears in the images, but it reflects enough sunlight to cause the bright crescent and diffracted rays that appear to be coming from the surface.

The other view of the planet, shown in the video at the top of this page and in the still image below, was taken by BepiColombo while it was 324 miles (522 kilometers) from Venus on Tuesday 10 August. BepiColombo could not use its main cameras to image the planet because they were blocked by another part of the spacecraft, but it could use its small surveillance cameras from its Mercury transfer module to take images as it goes. measure of its passage.

The spacecraft has approached from the night side of the planet, but part of the day side is also visible. Part of the spacecraft’s solar panel is also visible in the image, which provides it with energy as it continues its long journey to Mercury.

Once this overflight is complete, BepiColombo will switch to overflights of Mercury and will no longer return to Venus. But Solar Orbiter will perform six more flyovers of Venus during the period 2022 to 2030 as the sun approaches.

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