Solar Orbiter is a partnership between ESA and NASA. It will continue to make regular flybys of Venus to progressively increase its orbit inclination to best observe the Sun’s uncharted polar regions, which is key to understanding the Sun’s 11 year activity cycle.īepiColombo is a partnership between ESA and JAXA. On 27 November, Solar Orbiter will make a final flyby of Earth at 460 km, kicking off the start of its main mission. ![]() The two planetary orbiters will be delivered into Mercury orbit in late 2025, tasked with studying all aspects of this mysterious inner planet from its core to surface processes, magnetic field, and exosphere, to better understand the origin and evolution of a planet close to its parent star. Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo both have one more flyby this year.ĭuring the night of 1-2 October BepiColombo will see its destination for the first time, making its first of six flybys of Mercury at a distance of just 200 km distance. ![]() The planet's nightside, the part hidden from the Sun, appears as a dark semicircle surrounded by a bright crescent of light.īepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras captured a series of black-and-white snapshots, starting from the approach over the nightside, through closest approach and in the days after as the planet faded from view. The full set of images from the flyby is available in the Planetary Science Archive.īepiColombo’s second Venus flyby in images The footage shows Venus moving across the field of view from the left, while the Sun is off camera to the upper right. In the days leading up to the Venus flyby, the telescope caught the dramatic glare of the planet’s dayside. SoloHI usually takes images of the solar wind – the stream of charged particles constantly released from the Sun – by capturing the light scattered by electrons in the wind. ![]() Solar Orbiter’s SoloHI imager observed the nightside of Venus in the days before closest approach. It was not possible to take high-resolution imagery of Venus with the science cameras onboard either mission, but both could use other instruments to capture black-and-white imagery. SERENA is the Search for Exospheric Refilling and Emitted Natural Abundances instrument suite and PICAM is the Planetary Ion Camera. For example, the SERENA/PICAM ion particle detector on MPO clearly measured a peak in hydrogen ion density during the closest approach. Particles follow electromagnetic fields, and are also strongly related to processes in the ionosphere and atmosphere. Sensors on both BepiColombo MPO and MMO were also monitoring for ions circulating in the magnetosphere and in the close vicinity of Venus. It will take many weeks to make a detailed analysis of the two datasets. The Solar Orbiter magnetometer team also describes the magnetic field increasing in magnitude due to the compression of the field as they travelled past the flanks of the planet, and then a sharp drop as they crossed the bow shock back into the solar wind again.Īnd while Solar Orbiter crossed through the tail of the magnetosphere and out of the bow shock into the solar wind, BepiColombo was ‘upstream’, so the teams will know the input magnetic field conditions throughout the encounter to see how Venus has affected the solar wind downstream. The team is analysing this precious data and will use the measurement as a reference to fine-tune the instrument ahead of the scientific phase at Mercury.įlying through Venus’ magnetic environment The very small difference in gravitational attraction between BepiColombo’s centre of mass and ISA relative to Venus could be detected, the first time an accelerometer recorded this effect at another planet. The accelerometer also felt the tidal effects acting on the spacecraft as it flew at different distances past Venus. The resulting sound is rich with interesting effects due to the planet’s gravity acting on the spacecraft structure, the response of the spacecraft to the rapid temperature changes, and the reaction wheels that are working hard to compensate for these effects. The ISA team then translated the acceleration data into frequency to make them audible to the human ear. The Italian Spring Accelerometer (ISA) onboard the BepiColombo MPO recorded the accelerations measured by the spacecraft with great sensitivity. ![]() Both Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo also felt the immense gravitational pull of the planet in the angular momentum of their reaction wheels, which are used to maintain spacecraft attitude, keeping it pointing on course.
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