NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will make its seventh and final flyby of Venus tomorrow, capitalizing on the gravitational pull of our next-door neighbor to send the probe back toward the Sun.

When the probe reaches the Sun, it will become the closest man-made object to the surface of our star. The flyby prepares the probe to accomplish this feat and provides an opportunity to reflect on the extent of Parker’s revelations about Venus, since the ring of dust around the planet until fascinating radio signals of its atmosphere.

During its closest approach during the gravity assist, the probe will pass within 376 kilometers of the surface of Venus. In this maneuver, the probe will fly around Venus, taking advantage of the gravitational force that the planet exerts on the spacecraft to launch towards the Sun. Gravity assists are a practical tool for space agencies to minimize the fuel that spacecraft must carry and burn.

The Parker Solar Probe has already had close experiences with the Sun. In 2021, the probe flew past a coronal mass ejection – an explosion of particles and radiation coming from the star’s surface – and captured a nasty video of this extreme environment. The probe does the same thing in September 2022, helping researchers understand how solar plasma interacts with the interplanetary dust around it.

Flybys offer the opportunity to image the surface of worlds up close. During flybys in 2020 and 2021, the probe took images of the Venusian surface that matched data collected by the intrepid Magellan spacecraft 30 years earlier. The Parker probe took its images with its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, which revealed infrared emissions from the planet’s surface, which glows so hot that WISPR cameras could see the emissions through the dense clouds of the planet.

“As it flies over a number of similar and different landforms than previous Venus flybys, the November 6 flyby will give us more context to evaluate whether WISPR can help us distinguish the physical or even chemical properties of Venus’ surface “, said Noam Izenberg. , space scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, on a NASA plane release.

When Parker comes closest to the Sun, it will be within 3.86 million miles (6.12 million kilometers) of the star’s surface. The close pass, which will see the probe fly through plumes of plasma spewed by the Sun at a record 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 km/h), this is the final objective of the probe.

The closest approach is planned for December 24, during which the probe will be out of contact with mission control. But according to the same press release, the probe will emit a beacon on December 27 to notify mission control of its success and status.

The Parker Solar Probe mission is expected to end in 2025, after this dramatically close passage to our star. Whatever happens next, it will rest on the shoulders of a record-breaking spaceflight giant.