Venus To Host Two Visitors From Earth

Aug, 2021 - By SMI

NASA and ESA’s main objective behind this visit is to sling the orbiter out of the ecliptic plane which will enable it to get the views of the sun’s poles.

On their approach to the far regions of the solar system, two deep space probes are supposed to pass by Venus with the difference of about 30 hours. These probes will reach Mars on 9^th and 10^th August 2021. The Solar Orbiter would fly by the planet widely known as the ‘Earth’s Twin’ on august 9, 2021, while the BepiColombo Mercury Orbiter is supposed to fly by the planet on August 10, 2021. Though it may appear that everything is sliding downhill, trying to send spacecraft to Mercury and Venus consumes just as much energy, good if not better, than going to Mars and beyond. This is based on the fact that, while other visits to the outer solar system necessitate increasing speed, visits to the inner solar system entail losing speed.

This implies that a space probe approaching the Sun should either use huge rockets or find new ways to slow down. Since the 1970s, slingshot maneuvers have been used by world space agencies to improve speed without the demand for rockets. The first projectile maneuvers were performed on the Pioneer 11 mission when the space probe used Jupiter’s force of gravity to propel itself towards a flyby of Saturn. These projectile maneuvers are a little more complex in the internal network, often require multiple flybys of more than one planet to approach the required destination.

NASA and ESA’s main objective behind this visit is to sling the orbiter out of the ecliptic plane which will enable it to get the views of the sun’s poles. In the meantime, with its solar power rocket engine and six Mercury flybys, the FlyBeing of Venus by the JAXA/ESA BepiColombo will benefit it to reach Mercury in a stabilized orbit across the globe. Both the spacecrafts will collect data regarding Venus’s plasma and magnetic environments during the visit, which will be supervised by JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft, which is now in the orbit around the planet.