Parker Adjusts Her Course Slightly, For Next "Venus Slingshot" Maneuver...

Once again, lithe speedy lil' Parker is preparing for a ripping sprint past the Sun. But first, to gather more velocity, she will slingshot past Venus, in a close curving dip. [And we all know, Prof. Eugene Parker, the only then-living human ever to have a spacecraft bear his name, is beaming down on her -- proud of all that engineering marvel has already learned. . . and will teach all of us.]

So it is that NASA's solar/space science team this week fine tuned her trajectory -- by only a few miles per hour. . . so that she gets the maximum "crack of the whip", from the Venusian encounter. Here's that story, and a bit:

. . .Operating on preprogrammed commands from mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, Parker fired its small thrusters for 4.5 seconds, enough to adjust its trajectory by 77 miles and speed up – by 1.4 seconds – its closest approach to Venus. The precise timing and position are critical to that flyby, the sixth of seven approaches in which Parker uses the planet’s gravity to tighten its orbit around the Sun.

“Parker’s velocity is about 8.7 miles per second, so in terms of changing the spacecraft’s speed and direction, this trajectory correction maneuver may seem insignificant,” said Yanping Guo, mission design and navigation manager at APL. “However, the maneuver is critical to get us the desired gravity assist at Venus, which will significantly change Parker’s speed and distance to the Sun”.

Parker Solar Probe will be moving 394,742 miles per hour when it comes within just 4.5 million miles from the Sun’s surface – breaking its own record for speed and solar distance – on Sept. 27, 2023. . . .

Now you know. All so sublimely. . . excellent (even with rain fallin' in Music City, now -- smile). [Do contrast the above, with my next one, which will detail the lunacy of Greg Abbott, and some of his local Texas water cops. . . in opposition to the feds dismantling his razor wire blockade on the Rio Grande. Sheesh.]



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