NASA’s Parker Photo voltaic Probe executed a brief maneuver on Aug. 3, 2023, that saved the spacecraft on monitor to hit the intention level for the mission’s sixth Venus flyby on Monday, Aug. 21, 2023.
Working on preprogrammed instructions from mission control on the Johns Hopkins Utilized Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, Parker fired its small thrusters for 4.5 seconds, sufficient to regulate its trajectory by 77 miles and pace up—by 1.4 seconds—its closest approach to Venus. The precise timing and place are important to that flyby, the sixth of seven approaches through which Parker makes use of the planet’s gravity to tighten its orbit across the sun.
“Parker’s velocity is about 8.7 miles per second, so by way of altering the spacecraft’s pace and course, this trajectory correction maneuver could appear insignificant,” stated Yanping Guo, mission design and navigation supervisor at APL. “Nonetheless, the maneuver is important to get us the specified gravity help at Venus, which is able to considerably change Parker’s pace and distance to the sun.”
Parker Photo voltaic Probe shall be shifting 394,742 miles per hour when it comes inside simply 4.5 million miles from the sun’s floor—breaking its personal file for pace and solar distance—on Sept. 27, 2023.
Extra info:
Comply with the spacecraft’s journey by way of the internal solar system on the Parker Solar Probe website.
Offered by
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Quotation:
Course correction retains Parker Photo voltaic Probe on monitor for Venus flyby (2023, August 10)
retrieved 10 August 2023
from https://phys.org/information/2023-08-parker-solar-probe-track-venus.html
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