Washington: The Photo voltaic Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) telescope captured a gleaming view of Venus, throughout its latest flyby, NASA has mentioned.
On August 9, Photo voltaic Orbiter, a partnership between ESA and NASA handed inside 7,995 km of the floor of the planet.
The pictures present Venus approaching from the left whereas the Solar is off digicam to the higher proper. The planet’s nightside, the half hidden from the Solar, seems as a darkish semicircle surrounded by a vivid crescent of sunshine — glare from Venus’ extremely vivid sunlit aspect.
“Ideally, we might have been in a position to resolve some options on the nightside of the planet, however there was simply an excessive amount of sign from the dayside,” mentioned Phillip Hess, astrophysicist on the Naval Analysis Laboratory in Washington, DC, in a press release.A
“Solely a sliver of the dayside seems within the photos, nevertheless it displays sufficient daylight to trigger the brilliant crescent and the diffracted rays that appear to come back from the floor,” he added.
Two vivid stars are additionally seen within the background early within the sequence, earlier than being eclipsed by the planet. The rightmost is Omicron Tauri, and above and to the left of it’s Xi Tauri, which is definitely a quadruple star system. Each are a part of the Taurus constellation.
This was Photo voltaic Orbiter’s second Venus flyby, with an Earth flyby in November 2021 and 6 extra Venus flybys deliberate from 2022 to 2030.
The spacecraft makes use of Venus’ gravity to attract it nearer to the Solar and tilt its orbit, swinging it up and out in order to “look down” on the Solar. From this vantage level, Photo voltaic Orbiter will finally seize the primary photos of the Solar’s north and south poles.
On August 10, simply someday later, ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company’s BepiColombo mission additionally flew by Venus.
The monitoring cameras on board the BepiColombo mission to Mercury took a surprising sequence of 89 photos, the ESA mentioned in a press release.
The cameras took black-and-white snapshots in 1024 x 1024 pixel decision. The high-gain antenna of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and a part of the physique of the spacecraft are seen in entrance of Venus, the ESA mentioned.
(IANS)
