JULY 2017 | MANE ENGINEERING | 5
he Parker Solar Probe is NASA's plan to send a spacecraft closer to the Sun than ever before. The probe, expected to launch in 2018 atop of a Delta IV Heavy
Rocket. The probe, being developed by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, will spend seven years travelling into orbit around the Sun. To get there, the spacecraft will do seven flybys of Venus and will eventually bring it within 3.7 million miles of the Sun - about eight times closer than any previous spacecraft.
The £1.2 billion probe will dip inside the sun's atmosphere and have to survive extreme levels of radiation and temperatures of 1,400 degrees Celsius. NASA is relying a 4.5-inch heat shield with which to protect the probe’s suite of instruments from the brutal heat. The probe will travel four million miles to gain the required data. The expedition will hope to solve some of the biggest mysteries surrounding this star. The data will help to understand solar winds and aid scientist in discovering ways for humans to exist in high radiation potentially one day living outside our own atmosphere. The 685kg probe is expected to laugh in August of next year, from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. It will swing past venue seven times over several years in order to fine tune the orbit that will eventually bring it close to the sun.
The probe itself has been renamed the Parker Solar Probe in honour of Eugene Parker, a solar physics pioneer from the University of Chicago who in 1958 predicted the solar wind — the stream of energy and electrically-charged particles that flow from the Sun into space at more than 1m miles per hour. In the 1950s, Parker proposed a number of concepts about how stars — including our sun — give off energy. He called this cascade of energy the solar wind, and he described an entire complex system of plasmas, magnetic fields and energetic particles that make up this phenomenon. Parker also theorized an explanation for the superheated solar atmosphere, the corona, which is — contrary to what was expected by physics laws — hotter than the surface of the sun itself.
Many NASA missions have continued to focus on this complex space environment defined by our star — a field of research known as heliophysics. NASA and the European Space Agency have launched several satellites in the past to observe the Sun but they have operated from further away, where the heat and radiation are less intense. The nearest a spacecraft has previously come to the Sun was the Helios 2 mission in 1976, which flew to within 27 million miles. ■
TOUCHING THE SUN
STRANGE UNIVERSE FACTS
via Futurism