The Parker Solar Probe Just Dipped Into the Sun’s Corona

The Sun, as chances are you’ll know, is a huge blazing ball of nuclear fusion. It’s not the form of factor you’d wish to poke. But NASA scientists did simply that, utilizing the Parker Solar Probe to the touch the Sun’s corona, making direct contact with the star’s plasma and environment.

NASA’s been making an attempt to do that for some time. Previously, the Parker Solar Probe set data for being the quickest spacecraft and the spacecraft to make the closest strategy of the Sun. Now, the latter report has been outdone. The crew’s outcomes have been published this week in Physical Review Letters.

“It is hard to overstate the significance of both the event and the observations made by Parker Solar Probe,” mentioned Gary Zank, a co-investigator of the probe’s Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) Instrument, in an American Physical Society release. “For over 50 years, since the dawn of the space age, the heliospheric community has grappled with the unanswered problem of how the solar corona is heated to well over a million degrees to drive the solar wind.”

This ongoing mission to “touch the Sun” is an effective way of higher understanding heliophysics—how our star behaves. Since the Sun is the closest star to us, it’s additionally the one close by proxy for understanding different stars within the universe. Mysteries round variations in temperature all through the star and the way the Sun’s corona produces the photo voltaic wind made NASA resolve to launch a probe into the star itself. Of course, Parker needed to be armed with main defenses in opposition to the Sun’s excessive warmth and radiation.

While within the Sun’s corona, the probe sampled particles and the sturdy magnetic fields that abound there. The magnetic fields on the Sun are in all probability liable for its “campfires,” that are giant arced flares that occur on the star’s floor. The corona is a whole lot of instances hotter than the Sun’s floor, and scientists hope that the probe’s—erm, probing—will assist reveal why.

The probe’s sojourn into photo voltaic environment really occurred in late April, when Parker made its eighth shut strategy of the star. Justin Kasper, an astrophysicist on the University of Michigan and the research’s lead writer, told the AP that when the probe went into the Sun’s corona, it stayed there for about 5 hours, dashing by means of the piping scorching plasma at 62 miles per second. The probe additionally entered the corona throughout its ninth strategy, which occurred in August. According to a NASA launch, that entry allowed the probe to image coronal streamers, that are buildings of photo voltaic materials that appear like superheated threads.

From right here on out, each shut strategy of the Sun would require the probe to journey by means of the corona, choosing up extra knowledge on the way in which. Parker will proceed to poke out and in of the Sun till its remaining orbit in 2025.

More: How Will NASA Get This Probe to the Sun Without It Melting?