This New Image of Venus Shouldn’t Actually Exist #photography
On its journey to the sun the Parker Solar Probe captured this great picture of Venus. The NASA team was a bit surprised because they didn’t know that the specialized camera would pick up near-infrared wavelengths of light.
That WISPR can do this comes as a complete surprise to the Parker team, according to Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). This device is “tailored and tested for visible light observations,” said Vourlidas in the NASA statement, saying they “expected to see clouds, but the camera peered right through to the surface.”
“WISPR effectively captured the thermal emission of the Venusian surface,” added Brian Wood, an astrophysicist and WISPR team member from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, in the NASA release.
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