ORLANDO, Fla. – The fastest-moving human-made object ever is about to come seven times closer to the sun than any spacecraft before it.
The Parker Solar Probe, launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in 2018, is now moving at 430,000 mph in an orbit around the the sun. The probe is designed to help scientists learn more about our star’s upper atmosphere.
You can’t have the “Sunshine State” without the sun, but as much as we think we know it, our closest star remains one of the greatest mysteries in our sky.
“The visible surface is about 4,500 degrees, and then it heats up to a million degrees. How does the sun do this? We do not know. How do you find out? Well, you have to go there,” said Dr. Adam Szabo, a mission scientist at NASA.
Szabo has been researching our sun’s solar wind for more than 30 years. This particular mission has been in the works for more than five decades. And on Christmas Eve, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach to the sun, a mere 3.8 million miles from the solar surface.
“Three-point-eight million miles sounds like a really long distance if you have to walk it. On the other hand, more than 20 times closer to the Sun than Earth is well within the orbit of Mercury,” Szabo said.
A heat shield keeps the instruments on the probe at room temperature.
The spacecraft will orbit the sun every 88 days studying the solar wind while collecting data from the Sun’s upper atmosphere or Corona. The Corona is the wispy portion of the sun visible to us during a total solar eclipse. The solar wind is the expansion of the sun’s corona that envelops earth and the other planets.
“We see particles blowing out, but we do not get to see the detailed physics that takes place there that really needs to be measured locally,” Szabo said.
This is an especially exciting time for the Parker Solar Probe team as the sun has entered solar maximum, the peak of a roughly 11-year solar cycle. During the solar maximum, the sun can unleash immense explosions of light, energy and solar radiation.
The sun has been releasing powerful Coronal Mass Ejections or CMEs over the past year. These then create intense geomagnetic storms back here on Earth. Two of these storms were so intense that the northern lights or Auroras appeared all the way down to the Sunshine State.
What does it mean to you to see decades of work actually coming back now with this credible data that can be analyzed for years to come?
“To me, this is a culmination of decades of research and planning. I was part of the solar probe from the very beginning, so over 10 years of planning and building, If you cannot tell I am really excited about this mission,” Szabo said.
Like weather on earth, having instruments directly measure conditions is critical to forecasting. This new data will not only help scientists to better understand the solar wind, but will also help to better identify and forecast possible high-impact solar events.