While flying over Venus, the spacecraft took an impressive video

Venus is a toxic, real nightmare planet, but is there any other planet in the solar system that shines so brightly?

The answer is a resounding “no.” Venus is the brightest planet in the solar system and because of its brightness it is also called the “star of the dawn”. A clear demonstration of this is the overflight of ESA and NASA, the Solar Orbiter.

On August 9, this probe flew 7,995 kilometers from the surface of Venus. With this maneuver the ship sailed from Venus to E. წ. Received gravitational assistance to pick up the appropriate speed while moving around the sun and to stand on the right trajectory. In the future, the probe will perform six more such maneuvers.

At that time, the Solar Orbiter camera was adjusted to the planet and therefore could capture anything interesting. Such a thing is not uncommon, to get gravitational aid, Venus has been flown over NASA’s Parker solar probe and ESA’s Mercury probe BepiColombo.

Recently, Venus has been of particular interest; It has been reported that volcanic activity may still be present there, and strange molecules have been observed in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, there is only one active probe on Venus – the Japanese “Akatsuki” in its orbit. Consequently, the flights of other ships and their other tools can collect additional data.

These flights gave us really interesting information. For example, “Parker” observed formations on the surface behind the thick clouds of Venus; No one expected that it would be possible, but the fact is, it succeeded and even provided us with completely unexpected information.

During another flight, Parker detected radio emissions from Venus, the first such record in 30 years, and provided new information about how solar cycles affect the planet’s atmosphere.

That’s why the Solar Orbiter team was preparing to make observations when the probe flew to the dark, night side of Venus. Unfortunately, this did not happen – the planet is very, very bright, because it reflects about 75 percent of the sunlight that falls on it.

In the video you can see how Venus will turn into a white, colorless ball because of this. The video came a day later, on August 10, when the spacecraft BepiColombo flew to Venus for gravitational assistance.

“Ideally, we should have been able to detect certain formations on the night side of the planet, but there were too many signals coming from the daytime,” said astrophysicist Philip Hess of the Solar Orbiter.

According to him, only the silver reflection of the day side can be seen in the photos.

In the coming months and years, the Solar Orbiter will fly Venus six more times. Who knows, maybe then the probe will be able to gather even more information. Meanwhile, it is announced that NASA will launch two missions to Venus in the coming years.