NASA Parker Solar Probe is set to complete its seventh and final flyby of Venus today, a critical maneuver designed to bring the probe closer to its ultimate target: the sun. This gravity assist from Venus will change the probe’s trajectory, which will then take it to within 3.8 million miles from the sun —the closest any spacecraft will get to the sun.
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and it is designed to answer questions such as, how does the corona, the outermost layer of the Sun, become 300 times hotter than the solar surface while the probe comes as close as 3.83 million miles to the sun. The telescope, about as large as a tiny car, has been riding Venus’ gravity like a roller coaster, lowering its orbit around the Sun during each pass by the planet.
This can be elevat ed to a new level with drawback s made when Yanping Guo, the mission navigation manager of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), pointed out that this final Venusian flyby is considered a ‘critical’ element of the mission. Similarly, Nour Raouafi, Parker’s project scientist said this mission was similar to the Apollo moon landing, thus making it significant.
Apart from mapping the surface surface of Venus at the last time when the probe will be near the planet, data will be obtained. In earlier mission flybys, WISPR or the Wide Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe took never-before-seen images of Venus giving a look at surface details through the thick cloud layer. Once more, in today’s WISPR will capture images to help researchers differentiate between Venus’ landmarks and possibly determine surface variation in chemical compounds and age.
After this last flyby, the Parker Solar Probe will keep heading towards the sun at a top velocity of 430,000 miles per hour, crossing the outer layer of the sun’s corona on Christmas Eve. MISSION STATUS REPORT SOL 335 / REV B The health and success of the probe will be confirmed on December 27 when mission control should receive a beacon signaling Parker’s status after the maneuver.
