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Around 11 pm On Monday, NASA's "touching the sun" mission officially broke the record for the fastest moving spacecraft, becoming the fastest object ever created by humans, compared to the sun. However, recording a single historic moment was not enough for the brave explorer, because the same day, the Parker solar probe is also closer to the sun than any other previous probe.
"Parker Solar Probe is just 78 days old, and we are now closer to our star than any other spaceship in history," said Andy Driesman, project manager, in a Press release.
The new speed to beat is 153,454 miles an hour, seen from a still sun, according to the team's calculations. It's 90 times faster than your typical ball and more than twice as fast as the Earth orbiting our host star, the fastest we can ever travel. This clip also corresponds to just over two-tenths of the speed of light, or 230 "ultra-fires," as astrophysicist Jonathon McDowell put it on Twitter . Since Monday, this fierce speed has brought it at a distance of 26.55 million miles from the sun's surface, about three times closer to the star than the Earth's orbit.
It is no coincidence that Parker broke both records, both established by the German. The Helios 2 probe built and launched by the Americans in April 1976, the same day. The vast majority of this movement did not come from the rocket or spacecraft launch engines, but from the fact that it was collapsing towards the center of the solar system.
If we think that things move under the effect of gravity, down ', then in a gravitational sense, the sun sits at the bottom of a funnel to open up – that the planets encircle as one of those spiral pieces wishing for wells at the airport. Earth "rolls" around this gravity sink at 67,000 miles at the hour (or 30 kilometers per second in the astrophysically preferred units). Anything that is faster will come out of the well, as did probes such as Voyager and New Horizons to reach the outdoor solar system. Something slower will begin to wrap around the sun like a quarter-turn around the drain.
McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Center compares the Earth's place in this gravity well to the shallows of the beach. "We have to travel a long way out of the solar system, but we must not get up very much," he says. "Gravity is just spinning around our ankles." New Horizons, which holds the launch speed record from Earth, took off 16 kilometers per second from our planet, but in the same direction as our orbital motion , reinforcing it from an Earth. and pushing him towards Pluto.
Parker took the opposite approach. Falling in the sun would be easy if the craft were still, but it began to sail at the impressive speed of the Earth – so, first, NASA's rocket specialists had to slow it down. They had pulled it back into Earth's orbit, halving its speed against the sun and leaving the field open to start falling inwards. "That's why distance to the sun and speed records are related," says McDowell. "The closer we get, the more we are in gravity and the faster we fall."
And it fell. Now pushing 70 kilometers per second, the craft will continue to set new records continuously until its closest approach to the sun on November 6, when it will reach 95 kilometers per second (212 km / h). 500 miles to the hour) pbading five times closer to the star. that the Earth never does. From there, he will bypbad the sun and start climbing out of gravity, thus completing the first half of many orbits that bring him closer to the star's surface.
These loops will eventually plunge him directly into the misunderstood plasma that surrounds the sun. The crown paradoxically burns millions of degrees warmer than the surface of the star itself, despite millions of kilometers in space. NASA expects Parker to directly sample this unexplored area on its 22nd orbit, which will take approximately six years.
In the meantime, she will continue to surpbad her closest speed and approach records, which, according to McDowell, constitutes an appropriate update to the largely overlooked legacy of Helios 1 and 2. " The big space probes of the 1970s, the most ambitious, were divided into three pairs: Viking, Voyager and Helios. You've heard of Viking and Voyager, but you have never heard of Helios, "says McDowell. His measurements of the solar wind and the magnetic field do not capture the imagination of the public in the same way as his camera-carrying cousins, he suggests, but his speed record is still close to 42 years old. .
Helios 1 still holds the same price. record for fastest spacecraft moving relative to the Earth at about 96 kilometers per second, but Parker also comes for this superlative. According to McDowell, he should beat that speed on November 5 and set a new record of 110 kilometers per second two days later.
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