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Alex Young, Solar Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (middle), Nicola Fox, Parker Solar Probe Project Scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) (right), and Betsy Congdon, chief engineer of Solar Probe Thermal Protection System at APL (left), during a briefing on Parker Solar Probe's NASA at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, July 20, 2018. Photo: Reuters
CAPE CANAVERAL: NASA is preparing to send a probe closer to the Sun than anybody else. what other spaceship, enduring a nasty heat by zooming through the solar corona to study this outermost part of the stellar atmosphere. The Parker Solar Probe, a robotic spacecraft the size of a small car, is expected to be launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, August 6 being the launch date of the planned seven-year mission. . It is expected to fly within the Sun's crown within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the solar surface, seven times closer than any other spacecraft
"Send a probe to where you've never been – sending it in such brutal conditions is very ambitious," said Nicola Fox, a scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. , at a press conference on Friday
. 2, which in 1976 came in 27 million miles (43 million km). For comparison, the average distance of the Sun to the Earth is 150 million kilometers.
The crown gives birth to the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles that permeates the solar system. The unpredictable solar winds cause disturbances in the magnetic field of our planet and can wreak havoc with the Earth's communication technology. NASA hopes that the discoveries will enable scientists to predict changes in the Earth's space environment . "It is fundamental for us to be able to predict this space time just as we predict the weather here on Earth," said Alex Young, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "In the most extreme cases of these weather phenomena, it can affect our electrical networks on Earth."
The $ 1.5 billion project is the first major mission of NASA's Living With a Star program.
The spacecraft should use seven Venus flyovers for nearly seven years to gradually reduce its orbit around the Sun, using instruments designed to image the solar wind and study electric and magnetic fields, coronal plasma and energetic particles . The purpose of NASA is to collect data on the inner workings of the highly magnetized crown
. The probe, named after the American astrophysicist Eugene Newman Parker, will have to survive difficult heat and radiation conditions. It was equipped with a heat shield designed to maintain its instruments at an acceptable temperature of 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius), even though the spacecraft faces temperatures reaching nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Fahrenheit). ° C). Himalayan Times on
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