NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will make its seventh and final flyby of Venus tomorrow, capitalizing on our next-door-neighbor’s gravitational pull to fling the probe back towards the Sun.
When the probe gets to the Sun, it will become the closest any human-made object has come to the surface of our star. The flyby sets the probe up to accomplish that feat, and is an opportunity to reflect on the extent of Parker’s revelations about Venus, from the ring of dust around the planet to the intriguing radio signals from its atmosphere.
At its closest approach during the gravity assist, the probe will pass within 233 miles (376 kilometers) of Venus’ surface. In that maneuver, the probe will fly around Venus, leveraging the gravitational force the planet exerts on the spacecraft to launch itself towards the Sun. Gravity assists are a handy tool for space agencies aiming to minimize the fuel spacecraft need to carry and burn.
The Parker Solar Probe has had previous close shaves with the Sun. In 2021, the probe flew through a coronal mass ejection—an outburst of particles and radiation from the surface of the star—and captured some wicked video of that extreme environment. The probe did the same in September 2022, helping researchers understand how the Sun’s plasma interacts with the interplanetary dust around it.
Flybys provide an opportunity to image the surface of worlds up-close. During flybys in 2020 and 2021, the probe snapped images of the Venusian surface that corresponded with data collected by the intrepid Magellan spacecraft 30 years earlier. The Parker probe took its images with its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, which revealed infrared emissions from the planet’s surface, which glows so hot that the WISPR cameras could see the emissions through the planet’s dense clouds.
“Because it flies over a number of similar and different landforms than the previous Venus flybys, the Nov. 6 flyby will give us more context to evaluate whether WISPR can help us distinguish physical or even chemical properties of Venus’ surface,” said Noam Izenberg, a space scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in a NASA release.
When Parker makes its closest approach of the Sun, it will be within 3.86 million miles (6.12 million kilometers) of the star’s surface. The near-pass, which will see the probe fly through plumes of plasma spewing off the Sun at a record 430,000 miles per hour (692,000km/hr), is the probe’s final objective.
The closest approach is scheduled to occur on December 24, during which the probe will be out of contact with mission control. But according to the same release, the probe will transmit a beacon on December 27 to notify mission control of its success and condition.
The Parker Solar Probe mission is scheduled to end in 2025, after this dramatically near pass of our star. Whatever comes after it will sit on the shoulders of a record-breaking giant in spaceflight.
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