Both spacecraft will fly a few thousand kilometers from the planet Venus, Earth’s infernal twin and with a single day difference: Solar Orbiter will fly by Venus on Monday, August 9, 8,000 kilometers from the planet and BepiColombo will fly on Tuesday August 10, about 550 kilometers from the surface of Venus. The two head to the inner solar system supported by the gravity of Venus and both will make history when passing by the planet with only 33 hours of difference.
The missions
Solar Orbiter launched in 2020 with a mission to study the sun, while BepiColombo launched in 2018 and has been en route to Mercury ever since. Unfortunately, it will not be possible to follow the event live , although we will have many tests and results from it.
Solar Orbiter
The Solar Orbiter has already passed Venus once during a gravity assist in December 2020 and will make regular flybys of Venus as its orbital inclination increases. The spacecraft must face the sun during its flyby, but its SoloHI imaging instrument on the spacecraft is capable of imaging the nightside of Venus. It will also collect data on the planet’s magnetic and plasma environment.
BepiColombo
BepiColombo launched in 2018 and it will take seven years to reach its target, Mercurio. Its tortuous route will require flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury itself to reach the orbit of the smallest planet in our solar system and fight the gravitational pull of the Sun.
It is not possible to take high-resolution images of Venus with the onboard science cameras on any of the missions, so there will be no new images. However, two of the three BepiColombo monitoring cameras will take photos at the time of the close approach and in the days after as the planet fades away. The cameras will provide black and white snapshots with a resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels.
It will take many months to collect the coordinated flyby measurements and analyze them in a meaningful way, so the information will not be immediately available.
Both NASA and the European Space Agency will send more spacecraft to study Venus in more detail in the 2030s, where they will explore how it is possible that it became so different from Earth, despite having a similar origin.
