NASA's Parker Solar Probe Becomes First Spacecraft To 'Touch' the Sun (cnn.com) 63
Sixty years after NASA set the goal, and three years after its Parker Solar Probe launched, the spacecraft has become the first to "touch the sun." CNN World reports: The Parker Solar Probe has successfully flown through the sun's corona, or upper atmosphere, to sample particles and our star's magnetic fields. The announcement was made at the 2021 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans on Tuesday, and research from the solar milestone has been published in the Physical Review Letters.
The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and set out to circle closer and closer to the sun. Scientists, including the spacecraft's namesake astrophysicist Eugene Parker, want to answer fundamental questions about the solar wind that streams out from the sun, flinging energetic particles across the solar system. The sun's corona is much hotter than the actual surface of the star, and the spacecraft could provide insight about why. The corona is one million degrees Kelvin (1,800,000 degrees Fahrenheit) at its hottest point, while the surface is around 6,000 Kelvin (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit).
The spacecraft has already revealed surprising finds about the sun, including the 2019 discovery of magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind called switchbacks. Now, thanks to Parker's latest close approach to the sun, the spacecraft helped scientists determine that these switchbacks originate from the solar surface. Before Parker Solar Probe's mission is done, it will have made 21 close approaches to the sun over the course of seven years. The probe will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun's surface in 2024, closer to the star than Mercury -- the closest planet to the sun.
The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and set out to circle closer and closer to the sun. Scientists, including the spacecraft's namesake astrophysicist Eugene Parker, want to answer fundamental questions about the solar wind that streams out from the sun, flinging energetic particles across the solar system. The sun's corona is much hotter than the actual surface of the star, and the spacecraft could provide insight about why. The corona is one million degrees Kelvin (1,800,000 degrees Fahrenheit) at its hottest point, while the surface is around 6,000 Kelvin (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit).
The spacecraft has already revealed surprising finds about the sun, including the 2019 discovery of magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind called switchbacks. Now, thanks to Parker's latest close approach to the sun, the spacecraft helped scientists determine that these switchbacks originate from the solar surface. Before Parker Solar Probe's mission is done, it will have made 21 close approaches to the sun over the course of seven years. The probe will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun's surface in 2024, closer to the star than Mercury -- the closest planet to the sun.
Wow (Score:2, Funny)
That's hot
Closer than Mercury? (Score:3)
On its latest pass, the Parker Solar Probe passed within 6.5 million miles (10.5 million kilometers) of the sun. Mercury's orbit averages about 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) from the sun.
I don't understand why they would add the fact that the probe is closer to the sun than Mercury. Does anyone think Mercury is also in the sun's upper atmosphere? It seems like a strange fact to throw into the article.
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The funniest part is that CNN is center-right.
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Ya, it is almost as bad as FOX telling us that attack on its Christmas tree by a fellow with mental issues is an attack on Christmas. Jesus had a Christmas tree, he was fond of spending Christmas Eves praying for Santa to give him a really good haul. The Bible doesn't report how big his hauls of Christmas presents were, which frankly I find a bit derelict in their reporting.
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I find the relative distances useful to put 10.5 km into context in astrological terms, as I can't really imagine 10.5km in any meaningful way.
Re: Closer than Mercury? (Score:3)
You mean 10m km. 10 km is a bus ride downtown and back or a short leisure ride in a car.
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Given the "astrological terms" he was probably making a joke about actual 10.5 km and dense people.
Re: Closer than Mercury? (Score:4, Funny)
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You mean 10m km.
No, he means 10Gm. Does your computer have 16 million kilobytes?
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No, my computer has only 8million kilobytes, you insensitive clod!
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I don't understand why they would add the fact that the probe is closer to the sun than Mercury. Does anyone think Mercury is also in the sun's upper atmosphere?
Seriously? Yeah... To quote George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is. Now realize half of 'em are dumber than that."
I'd modify it to: Think of how stupid the average CNN viewer is.... etc.
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I'd modify it to: Think of how stupid the average CNN viewer is.... etc.
Yes, how stupid of those people to want to be informed, to listen to opposing views.
As opposed to those who watch the Fox tabloid who have yet to be informed several of the talking heads were in communication with the White House during the January 6th insurrection begging them to put out a statement to tell all those "tourists" to go home and stop attacking the capitol.
Nope, not once has the tabloid even mentioned all the texts and ema
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No Fox viewer has been subjected to these facts whereas CNN viewers have been fully informed. Guess who the stupid ones are.
Both? I'm gonna go with both.
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Okay, I'm going to guess who the stupid ones are. Are you ready? It might offend some people, but if I can get you to read the next sentence with an open mind, the world will be a better place:
The stupid ones are the people who haven't discovered that they can find primary sources of information using the internet. They still watch CNN or Fox, and only one or the other, according to their personality type, because they're too lazy to actually do the research necessary to have an informed opinion. And
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The stupid ones are the people who haven't discovered that they can find primary sources of information using the internet. They still watch CNN or Fox, and only one or the other, according to their personality type, because they're too lazy to actually do the research necessary to have an informed opinion.
PRECISELY.
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I'd modify it to: Think of how stupid the average CNN viewer is.... etc.
Yes, how stupid of those people to want to be informed, to listen to opposing views.
As opposed to those who watch the Fox tabloid
Ah.. My precious little snowflake.. I see what you did there...
For THIS FUCKING STORY we're talking about CNN, you window-licking retard. We can debate how shitty Fox News is, all you want, when it's relevant. This story was on CNN.
CNN is, quite arguably, a shitty network. There are MUCH BETTER liberal-leaning news outlets.
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On its latest pass, the Parker Solar Probe passed within 6.5 million miles (10.5 million kilometers) of the sun. Mercury's orbit averages about 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) from the sun.
I don't understand why they would add the fact that the probe is closer to the sun than Mercury. Does anyone think Mercury is also in the sun's upper atmosphere? It seems like a strange fact to throw into the article.
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What a bizarre thing to complain about. Most people do not know off-hand how close Mercury is to the Sun, though they may well know that it is the closest planet. Providing a common reference point for the public is good journalistic writing.
fly in the darkness (Score:2)
Re: fly in the darkness (Score:2)
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Reminds me of the lyrics of a song by Sting: "At night a candle's brighter than the Sun". What?!? ;-)
It doesn't matter how bright the sun is, if it's not in the sky then a candle is better.
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It doesn't matter how bright the sun is, if it's not in the sky then a candle is better.
Better? I'll agree it's brighter.. I'm not sure how one measures "better" though.
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It doesn't matter how bright the sun is, if it's not in the sky then a candle is better.
Better? I'll agree it's brighter.. I'm not sure how one measures "better" though.
Does it help you not trip over the cat when you're going to the loo?
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Having lived with cats most of my life I can absolutely, 100% guarantee you that NOTHING will prevent you from tripping over one day or night if they're determined to be at your feet.
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Does it help you not trip over the cat when you're going to the loo?
Mmmm..
No... I'll assume you live in the 3rd world (my sympathies). I have access to electricity (much of it solar powered). i.e. I have indoor lighting. When I go to the shitter the LED lights, in my house, provide all the illumination I need.
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Does it help you not trip over the cat when you're going to the loo?
Mmmm..
No... I'll assume you live in the 3rd world (my sympathies). I have access to electricity (much of it solar powered). i.e. I have indoor lighting. When I go to the shitter the LED lights, in my house, provide all the illumination I need.
We'll put you down as "too stupid to understand" and leave it at that, then.
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We'll put you down as "too stupid to understand" and leave it at that, then.
No problem. Make sure to put yourself down too. You apparently don't understand a tiny bit of dry humor. Sad, because you sound British (loo) and those people are the masters of dry humor.
PS Fuck you.
Let's not forget the shitty science comparisons (Score:3, Insightful)
The probe will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun's surface [...] Although that sounds far, researchers equate this to the probe sitting on the four-yard line of a football field and the sun being the end zone.
No American documentary or article about science is complete without a completely retarded comparison to Libraries of Congress, number of car engines or football field lengths.
Hint: If science education was better in the US, people would know 3.9 million miles is next door at astronomical scales.
Incidentally, they might also wonder why the distance isn't expressed as 6.3 million kilometers like in the rest of the world - excluding fucking Burma and Liberia - or even better, 0.042 AU which would drive the point home even more dramatically.
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Hint: If science education was better in the US, people would know 3.9 million miles is next door at astronomical scales.
And if frogs had wings....
Science education is horrific in this country. But that is the fault of the populace, not the education system. We turn out some of the best scientific minds in the world. The average window-licker simply doesn't give a shit about space. It's sad. Hell, they barely care about science beyond what they can feebly grasp to back up some stupid political stance.
I'm in my late 40's. In my entire life-time no human has walked on the moon... Like.. WTF? The last time a human was o
Re:Let's not forget the shitty science comparisons (Score:4, Insightful)
No American documentary or article about science is complete without a completely retarded comparison to Libraries of Congress, number of car engines or football field lengths.
It's called using a reference. People understand things better if they have something to compare it to. For example, "It will fit in the palm of your hand." Everyone, regardless of how big or small their hand is, can relate to that reference.
Remember back in the day when the head flying across the surface of a platter drive was described as a jet flying a foot or so above the ground at X miles per hour? People can relate to that. They can't relate to 0.00002 milimeters above a rotating disc travling at 1,000 rpm.
Hint: If science education was better in the US, people would know 3.9 million miles is next door at astronomical scales.
Large and small distances can't be comprehended by humans. You can say 3.9 million miles, but there's no reference to what that means (see above). No one on the planet travels 3.9 million miles. Looking at the Moon isn't even 3.9 million miles. People can't even understand what life was like 50 years ago. You expect them to understand millions of miles distance?
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How about "If the Earth was the size of a baseball, the sun would be about a mile away" would be about correct to within about 1.6%
Earths diameter is 12742km, Sun is 127,240,000 km away, so ratio of 11555 : 1 for distance to Sun : Earth's diameter
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How many people really understand the volume of information in the Library of Congress though?
With the internet publications would do well to try to play to an international audience too, e.g. use metric and imperial measures. "Football field" could refer to an American one or rest-of-the-world one (soccer).
Your example of the head of a HDD is interesting because I think the example is quite misleading. The head of the HDD is quite safely suspended on a cushion of air, and as any laptop owner will attest it
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How many people really understand the volume of information in the Library of Congress though?
Probably not the people using it as a metric. They are only considering the byte content of the printed text, not the information content of images and media in the collection.
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No. People are required to learn scientific notation when they're TWELVE in my country. If the US has a backwards school system then it will likely beget lazy journalists and ignorant readers. Raising the bar, continuously, is progress. We want more people learning more things, doing more things, newer, greater and more ambitious things. We don't want to accomodate and foster ignorance.
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Scientific notation does not let you really grasp how big 6x10^47 is. It just gives you a way of writing it.
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No one on the planet travels 3.9 million miles.
A truck driver driving a truck for 35 years might. Same as a sailor, especially in the Navy on a carrier.
My father was driving about 1million miles (1.5million km) in his car during his life time: as his driver, not by other drivers.
Jorge Cham's graphical illustration (Score:5, Informative)
Graphic illustration [aps.org] by Jorge Cham, aka, PHD Comics [phdcomics.com]
Re: Jorge Cham's graphical illustration (Score:2)
All I learned was if we run out of helium, we can just start mining it from the Sun. kthx.
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (Score:1)
Syd will be smiling.
Stealing North Korean Technology! (Score:2)
Of course, because they did it first, and also landed on the sun!
https://www.tweaktown.com/news... [tweaktown.com]
We expect NASA to be more innovative than that.
Naming (Score:2)
A great honour for Prof. Parker, but a missed opportunity for a cool name.
I'd love to have seen the meeting where the NASA bureaucrat told the engineers that No, we cannot call this the Icarus.
What is made of? How does it work? (Score:2)
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That's because it's been covered before [google.com].
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I too was curious since 1.6 million degrees seems very warm.
this side; http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl... [jhuapl.edu]
Explains that the probe can handle 2,500 degrees so I'm guessing it's not really exposed to 1.6M, still pretty hot.
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Four comments above you, someone linked a comic strip that went over the technology. I imagine, many of us already knew how it worked since this probe was launched in 2018, so it has been talked about quite a bit.
https://science.slashdot.org/c... [slashdot.org]
Golden Apples! (Score:2)
I'm surprised that nobody mentioned Bradbury's classic short story "The Golden Apples of the Sun" [wikipedia.org] - I thought it would quite familiar to the Slashdot demographic.
Anyway, though it took almost 70 years since it was published, we're almost there. All that's left is for the probe to scoop a cup of the Sun's fire and bring it home!
Historically inaccurate (Score:2)
Icarus: Am I joke to you?
What surface? (Score:2)
Lots of references to the sun's surface, it'd be nice if they explained what exactly they meant by that since the sun has no surface. At least no surface we can detect, and our theory suggests it's just increasingly dense gas and plasma all the way down.
Even the visible surface is completely arbitrary and varies wildly based on what wavelengths you're looking at it in - I want to say the diameter of the visible disc varies by something like a factor of two or more, though I could be grossly misremembering.
I've Read enough Books to Know (Score:1)
Sun's corona is hot but not dense (Score:3)
Yes. It has a carbon heat shield, but 1,000,000 degrees?
The reason must be that the corona at that distance from the sun has a very low density of its very hot individual gas particles.
Each particle has very high kinetic energy, thus the very high temperature, as temperature is defined as average kinetic energy.
But the heat shield runs into very view of these particles, so is not heated that much. The average energy transfer over the surface of the heat shield is fairly low, so it survives.
Moral of the story: Temperature is not a property of a volume of space but rather a property of the collection of particles in the space.
If the gas is not dense, i.e. the super-fast particles are few and far between, then counterintuitive stuff can happen.
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The probe is also in a highly elliptical orbit. It swings out all the way to Venus's orbit at aphelion, and the way orbital mechanics work it's only in close proximity to the Sun for a very brief period of time (that's when it moves the fastest). If it were in a stable orbit at such a distance, keeping it cool would be much more of a problem.