There's discussion of that upthread.

Probably one of the previous Venus missions, I think. No other planet gets that close to Earth, and I think we discussed it up thread!

Parker Solar Probe Looks Back at Home
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/p...ks-back-at-home

Anyone know how to access the raw data for this image?

Parker has completed its first solar close approach. Apparently it has been sending back "all is well" tones.

First Encounter with the Sun

Second perihelion, same distance as the first, today:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/201...olar-encounter/

First scientific results from Parker to be discussed tomorrow at 1:30pm EST, 10:30am PST.

LINK: NASA to present first findings

NASA release here. Small-scale magnetic field flips in the solar wind & other weirdness.

Earth in a sea of stars amidst the Milky Way
https://i.imgur.com/jiB37M1.gifv

Earth appears in Encounter 2:
https://wispr.nrl.navy.mil/wisprdata

Is that the Moon below and to the left? It seems a bit too bright (and tilted away from the ecliptic).

It's a background star. The Moon was too close to Earth to be resolved.

That's Spica. Parker's WISPR field of view is ~100 degrees, so Earth/Moon aren't resolved. Here's a picture from Eyes on the Solar System about that time. You can see Earth near Spica, and the other fast-moving planet is Mercury zipping past Jupiter.

High definition version of the Parker Solar Probe Earth encounter footage:
https://vimeo.com/377901512

Panorama with Earth

Earth seen from NASA's Parker Solar Probe

Gif: https://i.imgur.com/qjNnhod.gifv

NASA's Parker Solar Probe captured this prospect of Earth against her cosmic backdrop on 1st April 2019. Earth is the bright round spot in the center. The Moon was too close to Earth to be resolved. The background star near Earth is Spica. The curved lines are the result of cosmic rays hitting the camera sensor.

Data Source:
https://wispr.nrl.navy.mil/wisprdata

Parker will make its second flyby of Venus later today, setting it up for its closest pass yet to the sun on January 29. This fourth perihelion will be 20 per cent closer than its first three passes.

Article: Second Venus flyby

Current orbit diagram at the Parker Solar Probe website:

Click to view attachment

NASA's Parker Solar Probe captured this astonishing prospect of Earth swimming in a sea of stars over the course of ten days in April 2019. Earth is the first bright round spot that shows up and moves to the right of the frame before the Milky Way is seen. The Moon was too close to Earth to be resolved. The background star near Earth is Spica. Mercury is seen in transit across the Milky Way core. Venus is the very bright spot at the end. Jupiter and Saturn are also seen. The stripes are cosmic rays hitting the camera sensor. By the time Parker Solar Probe imaged Venus it was traveling at 95km/s (~213,000mph).

NASA Raw Data Source (Unfiltered L1 Earth Encounter)

Solar Wind Audio

And here's one of the Earth frames (psp_L1_wispr_20190402T170144_V1_2222)

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200121.html

interesting how its almost looks as if Venus gets born out of some sort of prominence at 0:24 sec in the youtube version and at 1:21 sec in the vimeo version

https://www.twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/statu...027345660207104

NASA Parker Solar Probe view of Earth

Earth Image Dataset
https://wispr.nrl.navy.mil/data/rel/fits/CAL1/20180925/

Context
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/p...ks-back-at-home

Hey guys, a huge slew of fascinating papers on Parker Solar Probe results - it looks like the near Sun environment is as complex and fascinating as anyone could wish for: https://iopscience.iop.org/issue/0067-0049/246/2

View of The Milky Way from NASA's Parker Solar Probe
Source (Encounter 4):
https://wispr.nrl.navy.mil/wisprdata

New renderings of Earth Encounter 2:
https://vimeo.com/420599154
https://vimeo.com/436115251

Parker probe has been busy spying on comet NEOWISE. I still haven't seen it myself.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/n...-comet-neowise/

I've spent the last 3 days unsuccessful too. Evening viewing starts for me tomorrow here in Florida.

Fantastic image of Venus released from this flyby, seeing through to the surface.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/p...g-view-of-venus

With guest appearance by Orion on the bottom right

for those using Celestia and want to fallow along, i put up a SPICE enabled add on
-- there might still be a few bugs it is still a work in progress

https://celestia.space/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=20883

Click to view attachment

A couple of rough-and-ready animations from the flyby:

The two best frames, showing the surface:
Click to view attachment

I wonder which IR wavelengths would be involved as it could indicate whether one could see either heat emissions, or sunlight scattered through the Venusian clouds. In this case we're looking at the night side, so it must be the heat emissions. The surface of Venus is so hot though that its IR emissions would peak at a relatively short wavelength, that would actually overlap somewhat with the solar spectrum around roughly 3 microns. A look at the atmospheric transmittance spectrum would be of interest.

On Venus, the temperature varies very linearly with altitude. The atmosphere itself radiates in IR, but the surface is still much, much denser than even Venus's dense atmosphere, so what we primarily see is a measure of the altitude. It's been established that the thermal IR signature for the surface corresponds to about 1 micron. 2+ microns moves the observation vertically upward into the atmosphere, and examines structure in clouds. (I was pleased, in early 2020, to join the ranks of amateurs who have imaged the surface of Venus looking through the nightside clouds at 1 micron.)

What makes this more complicated is that there are windows in the atmosphere (of course, primarily CO2) that pass IR better than others. The planned emissivity observations that would take place in any of the proposed remote sensing missions to Venus would take advantage of these.

I have to say that I'm quite surprised that the PSP imager achieved this level of signal pertaining to the surface of Venus. The detail is certainly there in certain narrow bands, but with a wide-band filter I would expect the noise to overwhelm the signal. I'm perplexed that PSP would achieve such a clear signal by accident, because it's quite difficult to do when trying to do so. One advantage for PSP vs. an earthbound observer is that from certain vantage points close to Venus and over its nightside, one can avoid much of the glare from the crescent of the dayside. Even a very slim crescent at the intense illumination of Venus's clouds can glare and ruin the image over much of the nightside.

All frames showing the nightside {Version 2.0}:

Click to view attachment

What's going on with all the streaks? These pictures make space seem very... not-empty.

This is the press release explanation, but I still have questions:

If it's dust and/or cosmic rays, why don't approximately all deep-space images have this sort of artifact? (I assume PSP isn't shedding orders of magnitude more material than other spacecraft at this point in its orbit.)

Is there something special about the instrument or observation that makes it pick this stuff up? (I know it has a very wide FOV, where most imagers we're used to are very narrow, but I'm failing to understand why that would have this effect.)

In some frames, particularly the fourth frame in Ian R's latest (reproduced here), the tracks are curved, which makes me think they can't be cosmic rays (should be fast = straight)? But that seems like a lot of dust. What is going on in this picture? (I assume the more orderly streaks are curved star trails, so presumably the spacecraft was changing attitude during the observation.)
Click to view attachment

Protons from the Sun are a type of cosmic ray and PSP is uniquely close to the Sun.

The trails can curve as they lose energy inside a solid medium.

Of course, one variable that drives up the number of artifacts is the exposure duration, and seeing the night side of Venus involves a relatively high exposure duration, but that depends on a lot of variables.

Deep Sky Object imagery is pretty prone to pick up on both cosmic ray hits and (from Earth, more likely) satellite / space junk / asteroid trails, and in images where you don't see those, there's a good chance that someone made an effort to remove them. I tend to shoot multi exposure images and when one out of many frames has such a flaw, I just don't use that frame for that part of the composite. for example.

It is debris in the near field, being accelerated by electrostatic forces

Hi. Longtime lurker here....working in the field of cosmic rays

It seems to me that the image shows a combination of stellar objects on the background, producing the left to right streaks due to the long exposure, with stratight traces from cosmic rays on the ccd, plus particles moving in the near field during said exposure time. Why do they move like that? local electromagnetic fields from the spacecraft? radiation pressure?...no idea!. But electrostatic forces alone would produce more straight lines wouldnt they?

The PSP is constantly being hit by hyper-velocity dust particles. It's easy to forget that PSP is not only coming into close proximity to the Sun, but also traveling through inter-planetary dust at unusually high velocities, making those impacts with microscopic dust particles far more impactful. This may speak to some of the earlier questions about image artifacts as a phenomenon which is, basically, so far unique to PSP alone among all interplanetary spacecraft.

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-tiny-grains-s...ty-impacts.html

From the report:



Ummm... how about Giotto?

I thought some similar image features had been seen on STEREO. And the impacts on Juno's solar arrays as detected in its star trackers were used to map the distribution of dust in the Zodiacal cloud and determine a Mars system origin for some of the dust....

I am most taken aback by the mention of "paint chips." Keep your paint away from my spacecraft...

Good catch, Ralph. I think the main difference with STEREO is that the impacts in that case led to fragmentation into smaller solid secondaries, while at the hypervelocity of PSP, the impactors are being turned into plasma.

Parker Solar Probe entered the solar corona for the first time during its eighth orbit back in April this year (2021). It has since flown by Venus again and just completed its tenth pass even closer.

This result released today. LINK: Touching the sun

YouTube video: Parker touches sun

Some rather unexpected results from the latest close flybys of the sun by Parker. Electromagnetic waves called "whistlers" help control heat flow in regions of the solar wind beyond 35 solar radii (about 0.16 AU). Inside of 28 solar radii however, the whistlers almost disappear, and instead there were electrostatic rather than electromagnetic waves that took over.

This is reported in a free access paper at the website for Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"The surprising observation that whistler-mode waves are almost never observed inside ∼28 Rs (∼0.13 au) is crucial for understanding the evolution of the solar wind close to the Sun. "

LINK: Article

Not sure if this should go under Parker or Venus... but Parker's WISPR instrument got something unexpected when they took some nighttime shots, expecting to see cloud tops... the first visual light images of the surface of Venus! Apparently it glows enough in the near-infrared/far red spectrum to be picked up at night!. Never expected to see this - fantastic

Sad news to report

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mou...t-eugene-parker

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory have released a video of the Parker Solar Probe passing through an especially powerful coronal mass ejection that took place last year. The video is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF_e5eYgJ3Y...chv=FF_e5eYgJ3Y

And here is a link to the Spaceweather page of 9/6/2022 that contains observations of the CME of 9/5/2022 as observed by NASA's Stereo A and Europe's Solar Orbiter probes. https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1...9&year=2022