NASA Solar Probe Is On A Groundbreaking Mission To “Touch The Sun”
A NASA probe has plunged into the Sun’s atmosphere as part of a daring mission to learn more about our closest star.
The journey marks the car-sized Parker Solar Probe’s closest solar encounter yet, coming closer to the Sun than any man-made object in history.
It began its plunge on Thursday evening, and will be out of communication with Earth for several days.
Swooping within 15million miles of the Sun’s surface, the probe will endure temperatures of 1,300C on its trip.
Any data collected will be sent back to Earth this spring within a period of several weeks
It marks the second of 24 planned flybys for the spacecraft.
The last of these, in 2024, will see PSP make a “final descent” into the Sun where it will burn up under extreme temperatures.
Specifically, Nasa is investigating how events know as solar flares erupt from the star.
Flares can disrupt communications on Earth and in extreme cases even know out power grids.
PSP was launched in August and travels at a top speed of 430,000 miles an hour – faster than any spacecraft in history.
The craft is using Venus’s gravity over the course of its 93million-miles journey to gradually bring its orbit closer to “touch the sun”, as Nasa calls it.
Of course, the spacecraft won’t actually touch the sun – its temperature is a ludicrously toasty 5,500C, and would instantly destroy any probe.
Instead, it will fly into the sun’s atmosphere, where it will observe from a “safe distance” of approximately four million miles away from the star’s surface – protected by a “cutting-edge heat shield”.
“The spacecraft will provide unprecedented information about our sun, where changing conditions can spread out into the solar system to affect Earth and other worlds,” explained Nasa in a statement.
“It will trace how energy and heat move through the Sun’s atmosphere and explore what accelerates the solar wind and solar energetic particles.”
According to Nasa, this will be the closest-ever observation of a star, travelling through the Sun’s atmosphere, or “corona”.
The Sun – all the facts you need to know
What is it, why does it exist, and why is it so ruddy hot all the time?
- The Sun is a huge star that lives at the centre of our solar system
- It’s a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, and provides most of the energy for life on Earth
- It measures a staggering 1.39million kilometres in diamter – making it 109 times bigger than Earth
- But its weight is 330,000 times that of Earth, and accounts for almost all of the mass in the SOlar System
- The Sun is mostly made up of hydrogen (73%), helium (25%) and then a number of other elements like oyxgen, carbon and iron
- Its surface temperature is around 5,505 degrees Celcius
- Scientists describe the Sun as being “middle-aged”
- The Sun formed 4.6billion years ago, and tt’s been in its current state for around four billion years
- And it’s expected that it will remain stable for another five billion years
- It doesn’t have enough mass to explode as a supernova
- Instead, we expect it to turn a hulking red giant
- During this phase, it will be so big that it will engulf Mercury, Venus and Earth
- Eventually it will turn into an incredibly hot white dwarf, and will stay that way for trillions of years
The measurements and imaging captured by the Parker Solar Probe will “revolutionise our understanding of the corona and the Sun-Earth connection”, Nasa revealed.
This mission is part of Nasa’s Living With A Star program, which aims to uncover the secrets of the relationship between the Sun and Earth.
The space agency said: “The goal is to provide the comprehensive research needed to understand the many factors affecting the Sun-Earth system and thus provide the information necessary for improved forecasting of space weather.
“LWS missions have been formulated to answer specific science questions about the
links between the various solar, Earth and space systems that affect space weather.”
Source: Uk Sun
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