Despite the fact that the main task of the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft is to observe the sun, during its mission it must complete seven gravity assist maneuvers around Venus.
One of them, the third in a row, Parker made on July 11, 2020, and during the flight, the WISPR wide-angle thermal imager made an amazing for scientists snapshot of the night side of Venus from a distance of 12,380 kilometers. It was possible to see it on Earth only now.
It turned out that the device managed to capture two remarkable details. First, this is a bright glow at the edge of Venus, which, according to scientists, was provoked by oxygen atoms in a chemical reaction on the night side of the planet.
On Venus, the camera detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet, which could be a night glow – light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules on the night side, explained Michael Buckley, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
The second notable feature is a dark spot in the center of the visible part of the disk, which geographically coincides with a hill on the surface of Venus called Aphrodite’s Land. That is, WISPR managed to look through the planet’s atmosphere, which NASA experts could not have imagined.
WISPR has been adapted and tested for visible light observations. We expected to see clouds, but the camera was looking directly at the surface, ”said Angelos Vourlidas, a researcher at the WISPR project.
This discovery prompted scientists to conduct additional studies of the device’s sensitivity to infrared light in the near future. If WISPR can indeed capture near-infrared light waves, this ability will provide new opportunities for studying dust around the Sun and in the inner solar system. If the ability is still not confirmed, then Parker Solar Probe will be the discoverer of a previously unknown “window” in the atmosphere of Venus.
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