The recently completed BepiColombo mission that just flew by Venus has revealed some amazing features of the planet’s atmospheric dynamics. While former hypotheses were directly related to the oxygen and carbon emission from Venus’s upper atmosphere, recent studies have shown that these mechanisms also exist.
BepiColombo’s flyby on August 10, 2021, took place in Venus’s intricate magnetosphere, which includes the magnetosheath as well as the magnetic field. Such a unique course of action allowed the spacecraft’s instruments to gather data on the carbon ion escape from the atmosphere of the Earth.
Lina Hadid, the principal researcher, remarks upon the importance of the observation of the Venus atmosphere as carbon ions with positive charge escaping, which has never been registered before. The driving forces of this escape are either electrostatic forces or centrifugal processes, and the future research will focus on comprehending them.
The data gathered by the Mercury Ion Analyzer (MIA) and the Mass Spectrum Analyzer (MSA) while BepiColombo is on its second Venus flyby offer irreplaceable information of the depletion of heavy ions and the history of the Venusian atmosphere. The ability to decipher these escape ways is one of the main tools for unraveling the planet’s atmospheric story, including its water loss over time.
In addition, the Europlanet SPIDER space weather modeling instruments contribute to the comprehension of the effect of charged particles on Venus’s magnetosheath, demonstrating the importance of cooperation in planetary exploration.
Dominique Delcourt stresses the necessity of detecting heavy ion loss in order to understand Venus’s atmosphere progressively, which is the most complete way. As it stands, such discoveries show the importance of flybys in the exploration of the parts of the planetary system that are inaccessible by the orbiting spacecraft, thereby, adding to the knowledge about celestial objects such as Venus.
The BepiColombo’s mission results are seen as a breakthrough in solving Venus’s atmosphere complex mysteries and will help to lay the foundation for future planetary exploration missions.
