NASA’s solar probe will attempt its final close flyby of the sun at the end of 2024. Provided by NASA
The solar probe ‘Parker’ launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will approach the closest point to the surface of the sun in human history in 2024.
On the 31st of last month (local time), the British BBC reported that Noor Lauafi, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who is participating in the Parker Solar Probe Project, said, “(By 2024) we will almost land on the sun’s surface,” and added, “Humanity’s first month in 1969. “It will be as monumental an event as the landing,” he was reported as saying.
The solar probe ‘Parker’, launched by NASA on August 12, 2018, with the goal of exploring the sun, is the probe that orbits closest to the solar surface. It orbits the sun 24 times over 7 years. The goal is to approach the closest distance from the sun, which is 6.1 million kilometers (km).
In October of last year, Parker performed his 17th close flight to the sun and succeeded in approaching a point about 7.26 million kilometers from the sun’s surface. The speed at this time is 635,266 km/h, which is the speed of traveling from New York to London in 30 seconds.
Ahead of the final attempt in 2025, this year we will increase the speed and attempt to approach the sun the closest. Three close flights are scheduled for 2024 alone. It plans to orbit Venus once around November 6th of this year and then approach closely to a place about 6.1 million km away from the sun’s surface on December 24th.
The reason Parker orbits Venus before flying close to the sun is to use the celestial body’s gravity to achieve a faster speed than the probe can achieve on its own. This is a technology called flyby or swingby, which involves passing close to a planet’s orbit and using the planet’s gravitational field to increase speed. In Parker’s case, Venus is the target.
When you get close to the sun’s surface, you have to endure the hot solar temperature. At perihelion, the closest point to the sun, the temperature on Parker’s forehead reaches about 1,400 degrees.
The Parker Project team installed a thick heat shield to ensure that the probe could withstand such high temperatures. By repeatedly approaching the sun and then moving away again, the probe has time to cool down.
As a result of continued exploration, Parker succeeded in observing for the first time that high-speed solar wind is generated from a corona hole on the sun’s surface in March last year. The corona is the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, and the solar wind refers to the flow of solar plasma that starts from the corona and moves forward.
“In December 2024, Parker will remain in the coronal hole for the longest time to observe the solar wind,” NASA Science Mission Director Nicola Fox said in an interview with the BBC. After completing this mission, Parker is expected to virtually reach the ‘peak’ of solar research at the end of this year, as it does not have the power to orbit Venus again.
