As of the end of last month, Parker made its sixteenth perihelion, where the spacecraft came within 5.3 million miles of the solar surface while moving at 364,610 miles per hour. The spacecraft emerged from the solar flyby healthy and operating normally.
It seems ironically fitting that we note this fine space science milestone, on the day we learned that the prior two days here on Jasoom were the hottest in recorded human history. Damn. Here's the good news from NASA | JHAPL -- with the Venus flyby due on August now dialed in:
. . .[And,] on Aug. 21, 2023, Parker Solar Probe will swing past Venus for its sixth flyby of the planet. To prepare for a smooth course, the mission team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) applied a small trajectory correction maneuver on June 7, 2023, the first course correction since March 2022. This flyby will be the sixth of seven planned flybys of Venus during Parker’s primary mission.
Parker uses Venus’ gravity to tighten its orbit around the Sun and set up a future perihelion at just 4.5 million miles from the Sun’s surface. As the Sun becomes increasingly active, this perihelion will be especially important to learning more about heliophysics. . . .
Now you know. Grin.
नमस्ते
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