It is apparently Venus flyby season. In our last episode, we brought you BepiColombo’s flyby of Venus, and today we have the flyby of Solar Orbiter. Both these spacecraft are using the gravity of Venus to adjust their orbiters to get in closer to the Sun, and neither was really designed to image Venus. This particular image is really weirdly exposed, and instead of showing a nice crescent Venus, it is showing is more of an angry Pac-Man.

According to mission scientist Phillip Hess: Ideally, we would have been able to resolve some features on the nightside of the planet, but there was just too much signal from the dayside. Only a sliver of the dayside appears in the images, but it reflects enough sunlight to cause the bright crescent and the diffracted rays that seem to come from the surface.

As a reminder: Venus is super shiny! And apparently, Venus is going to hold on to its secrets until we can send it one of those new dedicated missions.

More Information

NASA press release