Parker Solar Probe sees Venus orbital dust ring in first full view

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission gave scientists the first complete look at Venus ‘orbital dust ring, a collection of microscopic dust particles circulating around the Sun along Venus’ orbit. Although earlier missions made some observations about Venus’ dust ring, the images of Parker Solar Probe are the first to show the planet’s ring of the planet for almost its entire 360 ​​degrees around the sun.

Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR instrument – short for Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe – is designed to study the solar wind, the sun’s constantly flowing material. The space is teeming with dust, which reflects so much light that it usually shines at least a hundred times brighter than the solar wind. (The light reflected by the dust of space creates the zodiac sign, sometimes visible from the earth as a dim column of light rising from the horizon.)

To see the solar wind with WISPR, scientists use image processing to remove the dust background and stars from the images. This process worked so well that Venus’ orbital dust ring – which looks like a clear band extending across the images – was also pulled off. Only when Parker Solar Probe performed rolling maneuvers to drive the momentum on its way to its next solar fly, which changed the orientation of its cameras, was the static dust ring noticed by scientists. Based on the relative brightness, scientists estimate that the dust along Venus’ orbit is about 10% denser than in neighboring regions. The results are on April 7, 2021 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The German-American Helios spacecraft and NASA’s STEREO mission – in short Observatory for Solar Terrestrial Relations – both made earlier observations of the dust along Venus’ orbit. Those measurements enabled scientists to develop new models about the origin of dust along Venus’ orbit. Parker Solar Probe’s sensitive sculptors and unique orbit have given scientists an unprecedented look at Venus’ dust ring – something the scientific team has been aiming for since the early days of the mission.

As Parker Solar Probe flies closer and closer to the sun in the course of its mission, the science team also expects to make the first observations of a long-hypothesized dust-free zone, an area near the sun where dust is heated and evaporated by the intense sunlight. If there is a dust-free zone near the sun – an idea supported by regions of thinner dust that Parker Solar Probe has observed from afar – it would not only confirm theories about the interaction between our star and its nearby dust not, but it can also help astrophysicists studying objects in the distance: Just as space dust can obstruct the solar wind, it can also destroy measurements of stars and galaxies.

For many scientists, however, the substance itself is interesting. The exact origin of the substance that fills the solar system, for example, is not science. Scientists have been thinking for decades that the dust is junk of comets and asteroids – but new research using data from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter suggests that dust storms on Mars may be the source of much of the solar system’s dust.

Space dust can also form the building blocks of stars and planets, carry gases between galaxies and provide a feeding environment for young planets. These were some questions that scientists had in mind on the DUST-sounding mission – short for the determination of unknown, yet significant properties – launched in 2019 to investigate how dust grains solidify in the microgravity of space .