• This forum is specifically for the discussion of factual science and technology. When the topic moves to speculation, then it needs to also move to the parent forum, Science Fiction and Fantasy (SF/F).

    If the topic of a discussion becomes political, even remotely so, then it immediately does no longer belong here. Failure to comply with these simple and reasonable guidelines will result in one of the following.
    1. the thread will be moved to the appropriate forum
    2. the thread will be closed to further posts.
    3. the thread will remain, but the posts that deviate from the topic will be relocated or deleted.
    Thank you for understanding.​

Space: NASA’s Parker probe will get up close and personal with the sun

Introversion

Pie aren't squared, pie are round!
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 17, 2013
Messages
10,652
Reaction score
14,888
Location
Massachusetts
The spacecraft, set to launch August 4, will get within 6 million kilometers of our star

Science News said:
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is about to embark on one daredevil stunt of a space mission.

Slated to launch August 4, the probe will be the first spacecraft to swoop through the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, a roiling inferno of plasma heated to several million degrees Celsius.

Parker will whip around the sun two dozen times over the next seven years, skirting within about 6 million kilometers of the star’s surface — more than seven times as close as any previous spacecraft. At its nearest approach, Parker will hurtle through the corona at about 700,000 kilometers per hour, making the craft the fastest human-made object in the solar system. The probe would need only about a second to zip from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.

Parker’s closeup observations of the corona and the solar wind, the torrent of charged particles that the sun spews into space, could help resolve long-standing mysteries about the inner workings of the sun’s atmosphere. And the new data may improve forecasts for space weather that endangers spacecraft, astronauts and technology on the ground.

The trove of new data gathered by this probe “is going to answer a lot of questions that we couldn’t answer in any other way,” says Craig DeForest, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who is not involved in the mission. “There’s been a tremendous amount of anticipation.”

Scientists have had a probe like Parker on their mission wish lists for nearly 60 years. In 1958, the year that NASA was created, the National Academies’ Space Studies Board recommended that the new agency send a spacecraft inside the orbit of Mercury to investigate the environment surrounding the sun.

Over the years, several research groups have floated solar probe mission ideas, but none could get as close to the sun as astronomers wanted. “It’s only been recently that the technology of heat shields and everything else has converged well enough that we could make this a reality,” DeForest says.

About the size of a small car, the Parker Solar Probe will pack instruments to take 3-D images, measure electric and magnetic fields and catalog high-energy particles. Although the corona sizzles at millions of degrees, the atmosphere is so diffuse that most of the heat that will imperil Parker’s instruments comes from radiation emanating directly from the sun’s surface. This lethally intense sunlight can heat the face of the spacecraft to about 1370°.

...