NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) is on a mission to ‘touch the sun’, and will be the first spacecraft to fly through the outermost part of the star’s atmosphere, known as its corona. It is never going to return to earth but it can turn back and look at earth and it did.
The image was captured by the WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument, the only imaging instrument on board the Parker Solar Probe. On September 25, the Parker Solar Probe captured a view of Earth as it sped toward the first Venus gravity assist of the mission, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday. Check out the picture.
Earth is the bright spot near the centre of the right-hand image. (The bow-shaped brightness below is just an artifact of how imaging technology designed to work inside the sun’s atmosphere responds to an individual, particularly bright spot, according to a NASA statement.)
The probe launched August 12 and is due to arrive at its destination in November, but before that will pass Venus, using the planet’s gravitational pull to align its course – a manoeuvre known as a gravity assist.
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