It seems that sungazing is not the only thing NASA’s solar spacecraft is doing.
Three missions focusing on the activities of our nearest star – Parker Solar Probe, the Observatory for Solar Power and Earth Relations (STEREO) en Solar Orbiter (a partnership with the European Space Agency) – captured incredible images showing different worlds in our solar system.
These spacecraft fly in different parts of our environment in search of solar phenomena such as the extreme heat of the sun’s outer atmosphere, the distribution of dust in our solar system or the production of the solar wind – the constant stream of particles coming from our sun. But every spacecraft got an amazing view of planets that NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland had shared in a recent press release.
Solar Orbiter
This joint mission with ESA will eventually leave the solar system aircraft to study the solar poles. The spacecraft first sent the images in July 2020, about five months later. its introduction.
On November 18, a special image came when Solar Orbiter captured three planets in the same view. From left to right you see Venus (which looks extraordinarily bright as the sun bounces off the clouds from the planet), Uranus, Earth and Mars. The sun is just outside the image view on the right side of the frame.
Story turning point! It turns out that the planet Uranus is also visible in our #SolarOrbiter video 😄In the thread below @markmccaughrean explains how it was found hThank you, cosmic detectives! 🕵️♀️🕵️♂️ #science #CitizenScience #Venus #Earth #March #Uranus https://t.co/ZBj3LMOat128 January 2021
Solar Orbiter was about 250.6 million kilometers from Earth when the data was transmitted, which is a little less than twice the distance from the sun to the earth, or two astronomical units (AU). A single AU is about 150 million kilometers.
Parker Solar Probe
Our #ParkerSolarProbe spacecraft saw six of the planets on June 7, 2020 as it orbited the Sun during its fifth near solar flight. pic.twitter.com/pkWPcMFRoh26 January 2021
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will so far fly closer to the sun than any other spacecraft, as it tries to capture the ‘origin story’ of the solar wind. In this incredibly wide-ranging image of June 7, 2020 (days before a close approach to the sun), it took down six of the planets of our solar system.
From left to right it is Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Earth and Mercury. The spacecraft was about one AU from Earth during the imaging period, 158 million kilometers.
STEREO
The single operational STEREO spacecraft – one of a few that surrounded the sun behind and in front of the earth in the approximate orbit of our planet from 2014 – also looked at the planets on 7 June 2020. In this image you can see the same six planets as Parker on the same date. , but from a different vantage point in the solar system.
From left to right appear Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Saturn and Jupiter. The dark columns in the image are due to the saturation of the detector, which according to NASA is a combination of the long exposure time with the relative brightness of the planets compared to the background stars.
STEREO’s normal mission is to study the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, along with the solar wind, to improve the forecasts of the solar weather.
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