Uplink 56: Close Encounters of The Venus Kind

Join us on Thurs, 5 August with Joe Zender and Lina Hadid to discuss a history-making rendezvous as two science probes, the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter and ESA/JAXA BepiColombo, perform a double flyby of Venus just 33 hours apart on 9–10 August. We’ll be live from 8pm BST / 9pm CEST / 3pm EDT. You can set yourself a reminder here.

European Space Agency project scientist Joe Zender has been involved with many of ESA's planetary missions, including Huygens, Mars Express, Rosetta, and BepiColombo, as well as smaller-sized demonstration-type missions, Proba-2 and Proba-3. His scientific interests cover the study of the solar atmosphere and the solar wind. He is also a meteor observer and involved in the chemical analysis of the meteor ablation process in the Earth atmosphere. As BepiColombo Deputy Project Scientist, Joe plays a key role in the preparation activities for the nominal mission at Mercury starting in spring 2026. He also supports the coordination of instrument planning during the 7-year cruise phase, not least the many flybys at Earth, Venus, and Mercury.

Lina Hadid is a space plasma physicist who obtained her PhD at the Laboratoire de Physique de Plasma (LPP) of the École Polytechnique in France before starting post-doctoral research at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Uppsala. There she worked with the Cassini mission’s Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) team on the properties of Saturn’s ionosphere during the mission’s “Grand Finale” in 2017. In 2019, she took up an ESA research fellowship at ESTEC, working with Olivier Witasse to study the electrodynamical interaction between Saturn and its icy moon Enceladus, before returning to permanent CNRS position at the LPP. She is a co-Investigator of the Mass Spectrum Analyzer on board the magnetospheric orbiter of BepiColombo (Mio) and has led a working group coordinating multi-spacecraft observations from currently operating spacecraft in the inner heliosphere, in particular BepiColombo, Solar Orbiter, and Parker Solar Probe.

Join us on Thursday at 8pm BST / 9pm CEST / 3pm EDT to watch and join in at our Youtube channel. You can also catch past episodes of Uplink and subscribe for news about forthcoming editions. Don’t forget you can also sign up to our new weekly newsletter MISSION UPDATE right here!