The Parker Solar Probe While what looks like alien objects around the sun going down to the surface and even through the sun our probe only got within 7,000,000 miles of the sun at first and we considered this to be extremely close. Eventually the probe will get within 3,830,000 miles of the solar surface. Now it has entered the sun’s corona. This is allowing us to get data we have never seen before. What we have found out is there is a very large fluctuation at times in the speed of plasma from the sun and fluctuations in a magnetic field which are also called large fluctuations. What they have found out is as the magnetic field weekends during its fluctuations plasma ejections increase. Scientists have called this process a switchback. It is also being said there is sporadic bursts of rotational motion of the plasma. This makes me wonder if we will ever be able to get really close to the sun. Perhaps we will develop material or some sort of barrier to protect our probes in the future from the intensive heat of our star. A lot of radiation and high-speed dust has been found, which was expected. Scientists are now saying they have got more data from this mission than they expected. The sun is going through a very quiet period right now and scientists are saying they can’t wait for it to reach its solar maximum. They want to see what the data will be when there’s more activity. I am wondering how close can are satellite get before it melts? I do know it’s going to get closer and closer as it orbits. The Parker solar probe has become the fastest moving object we have ever launched into space. It is going to reach speeds of 430,000 miles per hour. That is far faster than anything we have ever sent out. Let me give you an example of what the speeds are of our rockets. In January 2006 we sent a rocket towards Mars. It was traveling at 36,000 miles per hour. The solar probe is traveling almost 12 times that speed. One of the things we really want to know more about is the solar wind. The solar wind comes from the sun and has only been measured near the planet earth previously. Some scientists feel the solar wind was responsible for scrubbing away the atmosphere of Mars. One of the things which is really puzzling scientists which they hope to get an answer to his how can particles accelerate from the sun at incredible speeds like 90,000 miles per second. Another question which needs answers is why does the corona have such high heat which can go up to 2,000,000°F and yet the surface of the sun is about 10,000°F. What is causing this tremendous increase in heat? Scientists have been trying to solve this puzzle for a long time but to no avail. They hope a much closer examination will have an answer to this question. If you are wondering why our probe has not melted already, it turns out there is a difference between heat and temperature. Heat is the amount of energy transfer but temperature measures how fast particles are moving. It turns out the sun’s corona is very thin and there are not a lot of particles that transfer energy. It is hard to believe an object moving faster than the sun’s corona is able to withstand the temperatures, but it turns out the faster it goes in, the faster the particles travel and the better chance it has of not melting. One NASA article gave an example of this but please don’t try it. They said if you stuck your hand in boiling water or put it in an oven which was at the same temperature your hand would not get his hot in the oven as it would in the water. I’ll take their word for this one. The probe was engineered in a special way because there is no denying the sun is a very tough customer and it is full of radiation. It has a special heat shield which was developed for it. NASA says the front side of the heat shield reaches 2500°F while this is happening the instrument behind it is operating at only 85°F. This just shows what modern technology can do. One of the problems is solar panels are used to supply the energy to the probe. To counter this 1 gallon of water is constantly circulated around the solar panels. Due to the distance of the solar probe from the earth there is a long delay before a signal can reach it and the same is true for when it sends signals back to the earth. As the sun uses up its fuel, it shrinks and we are talking about a very large object. Because of the shrinking the earth gets further away from the distance we are talking about, but compared to the overall distance of the earth from the sun this is minuscule. The earth circles the sun in an elliptical orbit so it is not always the same distance from the sun. Many people have the mistaken belief the sun is closer to the earth in the summer and nothing could be further from the truth. The earth is furthest from the sun in July and is closest to it in January, but because of the Earth’s tilt the earth is warmer in the summer. The sun makes up 99.86% of the entire mass of our solar system and yet there are far bigger stars in the universe than our sun. The sun would hold over 1,000,000 earth size planets. The sun has a diameter of 870,000 miles. In a strange coincidence it is said someday the sun will collapse into a sphere the same size as the earth. Even at the speed of light, it takes eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach the earth. If the sun blew up, we wouldn’t know it for eight minutes. Another strange fact is the sun is rotating in the opposite direction of the earth’s rotation. Stars are classified by their size and color and our sun is classified as a yellow dwarf star, and yet if we consider all the stars in our galaxy, the sun is larger than most, but smaller than quite a few. Some ancient people worship the sun as a God. At one time the ancient Egyptians worshiped the sun as RA. There is a lot to be learned from our sun and it might be quite helpful to us when we get out into space in a big way.
|
