Although it’s designed to study the Sun, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe scored first by collecting the first images of the surface of Venus in visible light using the Wisper Wide Field Imager while flying past the planet’s dark side in 2020 and 2021.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe
Although it is so similar in size and location to Earth that it is sometimes called our planet’s twin, Venus has been a mystery since the first telescope was invented.
Unlike the Moon or Mars, Venus is surrounded by dense clouds that hide its surface from the naked eye, leaving its geography a mystery until NASA’s Magellan mission searched through radar clouds in the 1990s to produce the first world maps, when JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft penetrated the envelope using X-ray images. Infrared, but so far, the only images in visible light of the surface came from the Soviet Venera landers during their short life on the planet in the 1970s.
That changed in July 2020 when the Parker Solar Probe made its third flyby of Venus. It was a maneuver designed to use the planet’s gravity to catapult the probe closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft in history, but it also gave scientists a chance to learn more about Venus. using the Whisper tool.
Since Whisper can see faint features in the atmosphere and the solar wind, the goal was to look at the cloud tops on Venus to measure their speed, and to the NASA scientists’ surprise, what they got was actually the surface of the planet itself.
This serendipitous discovery was so exciting that NASA decided to try again during Parker IV’s passage in February 2021 to take more pictures when Venus displays its entire dark side on the probe. The cloud is visible, the surface radiates heat at an extremely high temperature.
“The surface temperature of Venus, even on the night side, is about 460 degrees Celsius, and the rocky surface of Venus glows visibly, like a piece of iron pulled from The foundry.”
In fact, Whisper was able to see the surface through the clouds not only in the infrared, but in the same range of the spectrum visible to the human eye, even though the visible spectrum at the very red end fades into the very near infrared frequency. On a constructed image that accurately maps Magellan’s radar maps of the continental region of Aphrodite Terra, the Tilos Regio plateau, and the plains of Aino Planitia, with cooler areas and elevations appearing as dark spots.
Visible light on Venus
The new images are not only technically impressive, but also of great practical value. Because the materials glow in the infrared at unique wavelengths, these images can be used on later missions to learn more about the geology of Venus’ surface, as well as its evolution.
“We are pleased with the scientific insights the Parker Solar Probe has provided so far,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. Venus research in unexpected ways.
Source: New Atlas