Ever wondered how sunlight is on other planets? Well, you may never know when you could actually come across some proof!
Venus is well-known for its inhospitality. It’s a nightmarish planet, rough at edges, and apparently, the most reflective planet in our Solar System.
A recent flyby from NASA and ESA’s Solar Orbiter shows incredible sunlight gleaming off the clouds of Venus that’ll leave you in awe.
Here is what you need to see.
Venus’ Glare Captured by Solar Orbiter
The Solar Probe traveled within 7,995 kilometers (4,967 miles) of Venus as it had to do its 8 gravity assist maneuvers. These are necessary to get enough speed and trajectory boosts from Venus’s gravity as it orbits the Sun.
While performing the maneuvers, the Solar Orbiter’s Heliospheric Imager Instrument captured something quite mesmerizing, as you can see in the video below:
Investigating Venus’ Surface and Clouds: the Parker Solar Probe Mission
This flyby has offered astronomers useful data. Another mission, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, tracked surface features through Venus’s dense cloud layer. Such a thing was unexpected because it never happened before.
On another mission, Parker captured some peculiar radio emissions from Venus. The last time when something like this happened was 30 years ago!
The data allow scientists to figure out how the Sun’s cycles influence Venus’ atmosphere.
So, the Solar Orbiter’s recent work was more than necessary. NASA and ESA needed the orbiter to fly around the darkened nightside of Venus and captured something useful.
Unfortunately, the orbiter captured only the sunlight gleaming off the clouds of the planet.
“Ideally, we would have been able to resolve some features on the nightside of the planet, but there was just too much signal from the dayside,” explained Phillip Hess, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory of the Solar Orbiter images.
As previously mentioned, Venus is way too shiny. It reflects approximately 75 % of the sunlight that reaches it.