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Parker Solar Probe will “touch” the sun. 24 times. This is what the mission will look like
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NASA has just announced the gigantic success of its Parker Solar Probe space mission, which has been studying our star for three years. This year, the probe flew three times through the newly defined one boundaries the solar corona, of which the November flight was the first so close in the history of space exploration.
More about the Parker Solar mission can be found on the Gazeta.pl home page
The NASA probe flew right past the sun. And this is the tenth time
The Parker solar probe took off in August 2018 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and has been making further passes near the Sun since November of the same year. Each of the 24 planned perihels (the greatest approximations to the Sun in orbit) is intended to collect as much data as possible about the solar corona – the outermost part of our star’s atmosphere. You can read more about the first discoveries here:
There have been 10 such close-ups since the launch, but the last three were exceptional. NASA has just betrayed details on them and summarized the success of the mission so far, on the occasion of the meeting of the American Geophysical Union this week.
Parker has actually “touched” the Sun for the first time. Historical moment
NASA talks about an amazing milestone that was made this year. He emphasizes that only now has it actually been possible to actually fly into the solar corona. And that’s three times – in April, August and November this year. It turns out that we previously misinterpreted the conventional boundary of the solar corona and thus the atmosphere of the Sun.
Only the data collected during April flight showed that the probe managed to exceed the so-called the critical surface of Alfvén, or “border” of the solar atmosphere. According to the latest estimates by NASA, it extends from about 6.9 million km to about 13.8 million km from the photosphere, which is the “surface” of the Sun that is visible to us. Thus, it has been proved that the critical surface of Alfvén is not perfectly spherical in shape, but strongly undulating and at different distances from the photosphere.
On April 28, 2021, the Parker spacecraft approached a distance of 13 million km, making it actually enter the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time in history.
The last flight (on November 21 this year) was even more interesting, because the NASA probe managed to reach even shorter distance from our star. Parker Solar Probe flew in November’s perihelion at a distance of less than 8.5 million km from the photosphere. This is the shortest distance from the Sun ever achieved by man-made equipment.
The scientists’ mission is, above all, to discover why the solar corona is approx. 300 times hotter than the Sun’s photosphere, the temperature of which is even 2 million degrees Celsius. The second aspect is explaining how the solar wind is formed and why it accelerates to many millions of kilometers per hour, but only after leaving the solar corona. For decades, we have been unable to explain what drives it. And this is extremely important, because it is actually such a “cloud” of highly charged particles from our star that can damage or destroy devices made by man, and above all satellites orbiting the Earth.
The years to come will be even more interesting. And even closer
This, of course, is not the end of the Parker Solar Probe mission. This was planned for over 7 years, i.e. by the end of 2025. Future flights will be even more spectacular. The probe will continue to contract its orbit around the Sun and in subsequent perihels it will be even closer to the photosphere.
Five close passes in 2023 and 2024 promise to be extremely interesting, the first of which will take place in September 2023 and the last in September 2024. Each time the Parker spacecraft will fly less than 8 million km from the “surface” of the Sun.
However, we will have to wait for the record close-ups until December 24, 2024, when the probe will fly just over 6 million km from our star. NASA planned the last such close flight on December 12, 2025. The American space agency hopes that each of them will reveal even more faktw about our star.
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