NASA's Parker Solar Probe swings through Venus 'tail' in flyby today - Space.com

The Parker Solar Probe, which NASA launched in August 2018, is designed to swoop through the sun's super-hot outer atmosphere and help scientists understand the way our star shapes the solar system.

When Venus scientists first heard about the Parker Solar Probe's Venus flybys, they started scheming.

Eventually, they confirmed that Parker Solar Probe's instruments could capture scientifically interesting observations of our neighboring world, and they convinced the spacecraft's team to turn those instruments on for the flybys.

Parker Solar Probe makes second planetary flyby.

This time around, Parker Solar Probe's closest approach to Venus will bring it about 517 miles (832 kilometers) above the planet's surface.

Venus scientists are particularly excited about this flyby because it will carry Parker Solar Probe through what they call the "tail" of Venus.

Scientists hope that Parker Solar Probe's measurements will help them better understand atmospheric loss in general, not just today at Venus.

Conveniently enough, Venus, unlike Mars, loses its atmosphere in a way that's easily observed by the same plasma instruments that solar scientists needed to understand what's happening at our star.

But the technology of spacebound plasma science instruments has improved dramatically since those missions were built, Shannon Curry, a planetary physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com before Parker Solar Probe's previous Venus flyby, in December 2019.

Not only does Parker Solar Probe carry newer instruments, its data hauls have been phenomenally large.