WASHINGTON – NASA is on schedule to launch mankind’s first mission to theSun – a car sized probe that will swoop to within 4 million miles of thesolar surface, facing heat and radiation like no spacecraft before.
The Parker Solar Probe, which is expected to take off no earlier thanAugust 6 aboard United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy, will study the Suncloser than any human-made object ever has.
“We’ve been studying the Sun for decades, and now we’re finally going to gowhere the action is,” said Alex Young, associate director for science inthe Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center inthe US.
Our Sun is far more complex than meets the eye. Rather than the steady,unchanging disk it seems to human eyes, the Sun is a dynamic andmagnetically active star.
The Sun’s atmosphere constantly sends magnetised material outward,enveloping our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto and influencingevery world along the way.
Coils of magnetic energy can burst out with light and particle radiationthat travel through space and create temporary disruptions in ouratmosphere, sometimes garbling radio and communications signals near Earth.
The influence of solar activity on Earth and other worlds are collectivelyknown as space weather, and the key to understanding its origins lies inunderstanding the Sun itself.
“The Sun’s energy is always flowing past our world. And even though thesolar wind is invisible, we can see it encircling the poles as the aurora,which are beautiful – but reveal the enormous amount of energy andparticles that cascade into our atmosphere,” Nicky Fox, Parker SolarProbe’s project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied PhysicsLab.
“We don’t have a strong understanding of the mechanisms that drive thatwind toward us, and that’s what we’re heading out to discover,” said Fox.
The Parker Solar Probe carries a lineup of instruments to study the Sunboth remotely and in situ, or directly. Together, the data from theseinstruments should help scientists answer three foundational questionsabout our star.
A Sun-skimming mission like Parker Solar Probe has been a dream ofscientists for decades, but only recently has the needed technology – likethe heat shield, solar array cooling system, and fault management system -been available to make such a mission a reality.
Parker Solar Probe will explore the corona, a region of the Sun only seenfrom Earth when the Moon blocks out the Sun’s bright face during totalsolar eclipses.
The corona holds the answers to many of scientists’ outstanding questionsabout the Sun’s activity and processes.