Jakarta –
Last week the spacecraft Parker Solar Probe owned by NASA managed to ‘touch’ Sun. While circling the sun at such a close distance, how could this plane not be crushed and burned?
The Parker Solar Probe flew into the corona, which is the sun’s outermost atmosphere, in April. At that time, Parker’s distance from the sun’s surface was 10.4 million km, making it the closest man-made object to the sun.
Building space probes and scientific instruments that can withstand tremendous heat and still retrieve important data is certainly a huge challenge. So how did scientists create this super tough vehicle?
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics were among those who built and supervised Parker’s instruments that were exposed to the outside world. The instrument, called the Solar Probe Cup, sits outside the heat shield and is exposed to the sun’s plasma.
Anthony Case, an instrument scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, said as it approached the sun in April the instrument was so hot that it turned a red-orange color. The heat reaches 982 degrees Celsius, equivalent to volcanic lava.
Case says there’s one thing to keep in mind: the difference between temperature and heat. Temperature measures how fast the particles are moving, while heat is the energy transferred.
“You can feel how hot they are, how fast they are moving. That’s how we feel the temperature,” Case said, as quoted from Mashable, Sunday (12/26/2021).
“But in outer space, the number of particles is very, very few. So even though it’s millions of degrees hot, there are billions of times, or even billions of billions of times fewer particles than there are in the air on Earth,” he added.
The vacuum of space means there are not many particles that can transfer energy and heat. What makes the instrument temperature rise is the direct exposure to Sun.
The materials used are also important. These instruments are made of materials with high melting points such as tungsten, niobium, molybdenum, and sapphire. Tungsten alone can withstand heat up to 3,400 degrees Celsius.
This instrument took eight years to complete. During tests at a facility in France, scientists used thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight and focus it into a small area to test the material in superheated conditions.
Scientists say if this instrument will not melt if it is not strong with the heat around it. This instrument will evaporate immediately when exposed to a vacuum in space, following the process of sublimation.
The instruments and other electronics carried by the Parker Solar Probe are also protected by an 11.4 cm thick heat shield. The solar panels that power the aircraft also have a cooling system in the form of a gallon of deionized water which has a higher boiling point than usual.
Parker Solar Probe launched by NASA in 2018. The mission aims to study how the sun and the corona work. So far Parker has studied the solar wind and the magnetic zigzags within the wind, known as ‘switchbacks’.
Parker will continue to approach the sun and dive deeper into its atmosphere to gather more data. This mission will continue until 2025, at which point Parker is predicted to be 6.1 million km from the sun’s surface.
Watch Videos “History! NASA Plane Successfully Touches the Sun for the First Time“
[Gambas:Video 20detik]
(vmp/rns)
– .
