Almost no one ever writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore.
And the Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person.
Although the solar wind is invisible to the naked eye, when you see an aurora on Earth, that’s the solar wind interacting with Earth’s magnetosphere in a particularly violent way.
That’s a dynamic spacecraft And then you’ve got to have a pretty sophisticated spacecraft that can survive flying into the atmosphere of a star.
So, the Parker Solar Probe had to be robust enough to get near the Sun and then back into the coldness of space.
During the solar cycle, it was the night before Christmas.
There was not a single sunspot stirring or even bursting.
The corona carefully hung each stocking.
wishing for the Parker Solar Probe to arrive soon.
These days, almost no one writes about the Parker Solar Probe.
Yes, when the spacecraft launched, it received some attention. After all, it’s the fastest-moving thing that people have ever created. The probe is propelled by the Sun’s gravitational pull to reach its top speed of 430,000 miles per hour, which is more than 0.6 percent of the speed of light. It would take less than a minute to travel from New York City to Tokyo at that speed.
Additionally, the Parker Solar Probe holds the unique distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft to bear a living person’s name. In August 2018, physicist Eugene Parker was ninety-one years old when it was launched.
The probe has been whizzing through space and passing the Sun for the past six years, but not so much. To be honest, most people do not regularly consider the Sun’s complex structure and astrophysical characteristics.
The tiny probe, which weighs less than a metric ton and only has a scientific payload of roughly 110 pounds (50 kg), is set to make a dramatic turn. Literally. The Parker Solar Probe will get as close to the Sun as it has ever been on Christmas Eve. Flying into the solar atmosphere for the first time, it will pass within 3 to 8 million miles (6 to 1 million km) of the solar surface.
It will indeed get quite hot. On Christmas Eve, which is essentially the exact opposite of the North Pole, scientists predict that the probe’s heat shield will withstand temperatures of over 2,500° Fahrenheit (1,371° C).
directly addressing the source.
I talked to Nicky Fox, NASA’s chief of science, to find out why the probe is being tortured in this way. According to Fox, who was the Parker Solar Probe project scientist prior to relocating to NASA headquarters, scientists are eager to learn more about the solar wind’s beginnings.
This stream of charged particles is emitted from the corona, the outermost layer of the Sun. According to Fox, this specific mystery has baffled scientists for more than 50 years.
“Our goal is to locate the origin of the solar wind,” she stated.
Parker made this solar wind prediction back in the 1950s, before we had satellites or spacecraft to measure the Sun’s properties. Prior to the 1962 launch of the Mariner 2 mission, which began measuring the solar wind, the scientific community was largely skeptical of this theory—many even made fun of Parker.
Given how essential the solar wind is to the entire Solar System, scientists wanted to learn more about it as they started to accept Parker’s theory. Auroras are a result of the solar wind’s particularly violent interaction with Earth’s magnetosphere, despite the fact that the solar wind is invisible to the unaided eye.
The cost of building a spacecraft capable of reaching the Sun is high. And very challenging as well.
Sending a spacecraft to the Sun may seem like the simplest thing in the world to you. Ultimately, it’s this enormous celestial body with a strong gravitational pull. You should be able to throw anything into the sky and it should gravitate toward the Sun because of this attraction. The issue is that you do not want your spacecraft to fly straight into the Sun or to travel so quickly that it passes it and continues to move. Therefore, in order to get your spacecraft into the proper orbit, you need a fairly powerful rocket.
It’s a dynamic spacecraft.
If you want to survive flying into a star’s atmosphere, you also need a fairly advanced spacecraft. since it’s extremely hot and there’s terrible radiation everywhere, in addition to plasma.
The fact that you must enter the corona in order to observe the solar wind’s origin, however, cannot be avoided. Fox compared it to attempting to comprehend a forest by looking in from the outside. In reality, one must locate a clearing in the forest. However, because the forest is on fire, we really can’t stay there for very long.
In order to approach the Sun and then return to the frigid depths of space, the Parker Solar Probe needed to be sturdy. That presents yet another difficulty. The spacecraft is repeatedly switching between this extremely hot and cold environment.
According to Fox, “any kind of material that is heated and cooled only undergoes a continuous change of properties, either becoming brittle and crumbling or becoming elastic.”. It goes without saying that a spacecraft of this size cannot undergo a significant change in its properties. Additionally, you need something that is both durable and lightweight. “,”.
It also required hardening of the scientific instruments. A Faraday cup, a device that measures ion and electron fluxes from the solar wind, hangs out of the probe as it flies into the Sun. Specialized technologies were required. The cup itself is composed of titanium-zinc-molybdenum sheets, which have a melting point of roughly 4,260°F (2,349°C). The electronic wiring presented another difficulty because regular cables would melt. Therefore, a team at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory created the wires from niobium and grew sapphire crystal tubes to hang the wiring in.
All of that is to say that getting a spacecraft that was capable of the job required a significant investment of time, money, and technological advancements in exotic materials. And the Parker Solar Probe’s capabilities will finally be revealed on Christmas Eve.
