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A little more than a month after its seven – year mission to touch the sun, NASA 's Parker Solar Probe has relayed first – light data from each of its four instrument suites, the company said. American Space Agency.
On September 9th, the Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) – the only imager in the probe – was opened, allowing the instrument to take the first images while traveling to the sun.
WISPR with its internal and external telescope highlighted a two-panel blue image of space with visible stars everywhere.
While the sun is not visible in the picture, he showed Jupiter.
Launched on August 12, Parker Solar Probe, NASA's small historical spacecraft will gradually move closer to the Sun until it approaches 3.8 million kilometers.
"All the instruments returned data that is not only used for calibration, but also capture what we expect from them near the Sun to solve the mysteries of the solar atmosphere, the crown" says Nour Raouafi, Johns project scientist. Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland.
Although these early data are not yet examples of key scientific observations that the probe should transmit in December, this shows that each of its four suites of instruments is working well.
The probe also sent data from its three other instruments on board: ISoIS, FIELDS and SWEAP, all dedicated to the discovery of the mysteries of the Sun.
ISoIS (pronounced "ee-sis" and includes the sun symbol in its acronym), two energetic particle instruments – EPI-Lo and EPI-Hi – cover a range of energies for these particles driven by the &. activity.
The initial data from EPI-Lo show cosmic background rays, particles that have been excited and skyrocketed in our solar system since other parts of the galaxy.
The EPI-Hi data show detections of hydrogen and helium particles from its low-energy telescopes.
The four FIELDS electric field antennas at the front of the probe observed the signatures of a solar flare, while the SWEAPs (Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons), three instruments, saw the solar wind .
The first approach to the Sun by Parker Solar Probe will take place in November.
Over the next two months, he will fly to Venus, performing his first Venus gravimetric assistance in early October.
Throughout its mission, the spacecraft will make six more flights of Venus and 24 passages in total by the Sun.
The probe is named after Eugene Parker, a solar physicist who, in 1958, had predicted the existence of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles and magnetic fields that continually flowed from the Sun.
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