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The National Administration of Aeronautics and Space ( NASA ) confirmed today that it is about to launch August 6, one of his most ambitious missions, Parker solar probe, whose lens will be studying the surface of the Sun, so it will be the closest to the star.
The plan of the mission is to place the Parker Probe at a distance of about 6.1 million kilometers from the surface of the sun in its outer atmosphere or crown, where temperatures reach millions of degrees Kelvin.
"We have been studying the sun for decades, and now we will finally go where the action is," said Alex Young, director of science at the Heliophysical Science Division at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., 19659004. Scientists from NASA and others have presented the objectives of the Parker Solar Probe mission, which will be launched from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at a conference of TV news Friday.
The Parker Solar Probe will gradually approach the Sun, approaching after each flight over Venus before reaching a perihelion – its closest point to the Sun – at a distance of Approximately 3.8 million miles (about 6.1 million kilometers) by the end of 2024.
This distance will place the probe within the orbit of Mercury, which will be closer to the Sun than the Helios 2 mission in the United States in 1976.
The mission is named after Eugene Parker, the scientist who predicted in 1958 the influence of the solar wind , a plasma flow that travels outward through the solar system . The probe, the size of a sedan, used technology developed by NASA over the past six decades to make possible the scientific objectives of the mission.
NASA said in a statement that the key to the spacecraft's journey is three major advances: the advanced thermal screen, the cooling system of solar panels and the advanced defect management system. [19659003] "The thermal protection system is one of the enabling technologies of the spacecraft (…) It allows the spacecraft to operate at room temperature," says Andy Driesman, project leader of the Solar Parker Sonar mission at the Laboratory. Applied Physics Johns Hopkins.
Other key innovations are solar panel cooling system and onboard fault management systems.
The solar system cooling system allows solar panels to produce energy under the intense heat load of the sun and the fault management system protects the probe for extended periods when the spacecraft can not communicate with the Earth.
The mission aims to study several aspects considered scientific mysteries, such as the solar wind acceleration, the constant output of the Sun's material . "Although we largely capture the origins of the solar wind in the Sun, we know that there is a point, not yet observed, where the solar wind is accelerating at supersonic speeds," NASA said.
The data show that these changes occur in the corona, a region of the Sun's atmosphere where the probe will fly directly, and scientists plan to use the measurements that the probe will do to make the light about how this phenomenon occurs.
Scientists also hope to learn the secret of the enormous temperatures of the solar corona.
The temperature of the visible surface of the Sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit but, for reasons that are not yet completely understood, the crown is hundreds of times warmer, reaching several million degrees Fahrenheit.
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