2024 lunar calendars on sale now. Makes a great gift! Check it out here.
- Parker Solar Probe is a mission to study the sun. In 2021 it became the first spacecraft to “touch” the sun, when it flew though our sun’s wispy atmosphere.
- Parker performed its last flyby of Venus on November 6, 2024, in order to get it into position for its final studies of the sun.
- The flyby also allowed Parker to see Venus’ surface, even through the thick cloud cover. Previous flybys have shown differences in the Venusian surface from the Magellan mission in the 1990s.
Miles Hatfield wrote this original article for NASA on November 4, 2024. Edits by EarthSky.
Final Parker Solar Probe flyby of Venus
On November 6, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe completed its final Venus gravity assist maneuver, passing within 233 miles (375 km) of Venus’ surface. The flyby adjusted Parker’s trajectory into its final orbital configuration, bringing the spacecraft to within an unprecedented 3.8 million miles (6.2 million km) of the solar surface on December 24, 2024. It will be the closest any human-made object has been to the sun.
Parker’s Venus flybys have become boons for new Venus science, thanks to a chance discovery from its Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR. The instrument peers out from Parker and away from the sun to see fine details in the solar wind. But on July 11, 2020, during Parker’s third Venus flyby, scientists turned WISPR toward Venus in hopes of tracking changes in the planet’s thick cloud cover. The images revealed a surprise: a portion of WISPR’s data, which captures visible and near infrared light, seemed to see all the way through the clouds to the Venusian surface below.
Noam Izenberg, a space scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said:
The WISPR cameras can see through the clouds to the surface of Venus, which glows in the near-infrared because it’s so hot.
Venus, sizzling at approximately 869 degrees Fahrenheit (about 465 C), was radiating through the clouds.
The WISPR images from the 2020 flyby, as well as the next flyby in 2021, revealed Venus’ surface in a new light. But they also raised puzzling questions, and scientists devised the November 6 flyby to help answer them.
Seeing Venus’ surface
The Venus images correspond well with data from the Magellan spacecraft. The images show dark and light patterns that line up with surface regions Magellan captured when it mapped Venus’ surface using radar from 1990 to 1994. Yet some parts of the WISPR images appear brighter than expected, hinting at extra information captured by WISPR’s data. Is WISPR picking up on chemical differences on the surface, where the ground is made of different material? Perhaps it’s seeing variations in age, where more recent lava flows added a fresh coat to the Venusian surface.
Izenberg said:
Because it flies over a number of similar and different landforms than the previous Venus flybys, the November 6 flyby will give us more context to evaluate whether WISPR can help us distinguish physical or even chemical properties of Venus’ surface.
Next up: Parker’s final explorations of the sun
After the November 6 flyby, Parker will be on course to swoop within 3.8 million miles (6.2 million km) of the solar surface, the final objective of the historic mission first conceived over 65 years ago. No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker’s data will be charting as-yet uncharted territory. In this hyper-close regime, Parker will cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the sun. It is close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave.
Adam Szabo, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said:
This is a major engineering accomplishment.
The closest approach to the sun, or perihelion, will occur on December 24, 2024. At that time, mission control will be out of contact with the spacecraft. Parker will send a beacon tone on December 27, 2024, to confirm its success and the spacecraft’s health. Parker will remain in this orbit for the remainder of its mission, completing two more perihelia at the same distance.
Bottom line: The final Parker Solar Probe flyby of Venus happened on November 6, 2024. Previous flybys of Venus have shown surface features beneath the planet’s thick clouds. What will the final flyby reveal?