NASA prepares mission to "touch the sun"

Reach closer to the sun than any other space project in history has reached. This is the goal with which the Parker Solar Probe mission is being presented, which will be launched next August.

On Saturday morning, the US National Space Agency (NASA) announced that a robot with vehicle features will travel to our star. This is a project developed in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, the US Naval Research Laboratory. UU., University of Michigan, Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Princeton University in New Jersey and University of California at Berkeley.

"We have been studying the sun for decades, now we will finally go where the action is taking place," said Alex Young, deputy director of science at the Heliophysical Sciences Division of the Goddard Space Center of the NASA, Maryland, at a press conference.

Young says the launch is scheduled for Cape Canaveral, Florida, around August 6th.

This star is more complex than what our eyes observe when they look at the sky. The human eye seems to be a sphere that does not move, but the sun is a very dynamic star with active magnetic fields. The solar atmosphere constantly sends magnetized material into the solar system, the impact of these magnetic waves exceeds Pluto, the farthest planet.

As if that were not enough, this magnetic energy can go further and create temporary distortions in the system.

According to Young and his team, there is an influence of this solar activity on the Earth and other celestial bodies. This field of study is called spatial climatology, and the key to understanding its origin and its characteristics begins with the understanding of the sun first.

"The energy of the sun continues to flow and goes beyond our planet.The solar wind is invisible, but we can see it reaching the dawn poles.We do not know enough about mechanisms by which the solar wind reaches us.It is what we want to know, "said Nicky Fox, researcher at Johns Hopkins

One of the questions we want to answer is the solar wind acceleration. This wind, as its name indicates, has its origin in the sun, but after leaving it there is a point – which has not yet been discovered air accelerates at supersonic speeds. There are some hypotheses that say that this change of speed occurs in the crown (outer part of the solar atmosphere). The Parker Solar Probe moves directly to the crown. Scientists hope to gather the information they need.

Another aspect to learn is the "secret" behind the high temperatures of the crown. The visible surface of the sun has a temperature close to 5500 ° C, but the crown is hundreds of times warmer, several million degrees Celsius. This is strange and attracts the attention of scientists because the energy is produced in the inner parts of the sun and it does not seem logical that the outer part is warmer.

"It's like you're far away from a bonfire and suddenly, when you're farther away from that, you'll feel a lot warmer," explained Fox.

Finally, he There is a third question to which this mission seeks to answer: the mechanisms of the acceleration of solar particles, which can reach velocities close to half the speed of light, and these particles can interfere with the magnetic fields of the satellites

To carry out this mission, the device embeds four types of instruments.The first is named fields (fields, in English) e t was developed by the University of California at Berkeley. This instrument measures the electric and magnetic fields around the spacecraft. In addition, it captures waves and turbulence in time close to real time. This will help to understand the fields and how they are associated with solar waves.

The second instrument is called WISPR (wide-field solar probe camera, for its acronym in English). This is the only type of camera or imaging instrument in the entire device. This team will take pictures of structures such as solar waves, activities and the movement of the crown and the solar environment. This device is developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington

The third equipment is called SWEAP (Investigation of Protons and Electrons in the Solar Wind, for its acronym). This team uses two instruments to take data. First, we count the electrons, the protons and the ions (parts of atoms and atoms with positive or negative charges). The other insturmento measures the speed, density and temperature of the wind. This complex system is a product of the work of the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley and the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Finally, the ISOIS instrument measures particles according to their energy and movement (direction, speed, alteration and when acceleration occurs). The University of Princeton is in charge of this part.

There are still no possible dates for the first data, since the sun must first be reached and the researchers have no date for it. However, they assure that the importance of this mission is transcendental.

"By studying our star, we can not only learn more from the sun, we will also learn about all the other stars that impact the galaxy and we may even have clues about the beginning of life." , concluded Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator of NASA Science Missions