Venus not scheduled to make rare transit past the Sun again for 105 years

May 26, 2012 – SPACE – A NASA Sun-watching spacecraft will have an unbeatable view of June’s historic Venus transit, but some of the probe’s scientists are taking measures to get a great look for themselves here on Earth, too. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite will watch from space as Venus crosses the sun’s face on June 5 (June 6 in the Eastern Hemisphere) — the last such Venus transit until December 2117. Not content to live vicariously through their spacecraft, some SDO scientists are headed to Alaska to watch the seven-hour event in its entirety. “For the United States, only Hawaii and Alaska will see the entire transit,” said SDO project scientist Dean Pesnell, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “There’s a solar physics meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, the week after the transit. So we said, ‘Well, let’s go to Alaska and see the transit.’” Venus transits occur in pairs that are eight years apart, but these dual events take place less than once per century. The last transit happened in 2004, and the next won’t come until 2117. So next month’s transit is the last chance for skywatchers to see Earth’s so-called sister planet trek across the solar disk. –Mother Nature Network