Sunspot telescope assisting NASA's Parker solar probe

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SUNSPOT – The Dunn solar telescope from the Sunspot Solar Observatory has helped NASA's Parker solar probe this week.

Members of the public were allowed to observe the Dunn telescope, 1.80 m high, followed by the Parker probe from Friday to Sunday.

NASA's Parker solar probe is an unmanned spacecraft that was launched in August to study the sun.

The director of the Sunspot solar observatory, James McAteer, said the observatory served as a focus for the solar probe.

The probe takes measurements of various sun features – such as temperatures, densities and magnetic fields – but does not see what it looks, he said.

"It's like one of those rotating sprinkler heads," McAteer said. "Imagine that you simply detect droplets of water in a certain part of your lawn, and that's all you've had. We'll tell you what the sprinkler looks like, what the sprinkler does instead of the water droplets. We will be able to say that when this plasma came from the sun, here is what (the sun) looked like. "

He added that Sunspot had participated in the mission because the other telescopes in the world could not maneuver to see where the probe would be.

"It's a complex task, because the connectivity between the sun and the spot space traversed by the Parker solar probe is not just a straight line connection," he said. "We constantly use models to predict where it is."

The data will be shared with the global solar community, McAteer said.

"We are eager to see how many people want to use it," he said.

Last weekend was unique because the spacecraft was traveling at the same speed as the sun, which means that she stayed on top of the same part of the sun until she got there. be sent back to the solar system, McAteer said.

The probe flies towards the sun and picks up speed by taking advantage of planetary gravity and helping its orbit around the sun. The craft had its first gravitational assistance from Venus in early October, according to a NASA press release.

The gravitational aids will help the spacecraft to make increasingly tight orbits around the sun, bringing it to its closest orbit in 2025. The craft will perform 24 orbits around the sun during its mission , says the release.

The sunspot observatory will play a similar role each time the probe orbits the sun, McAteer said.

The Parker mission will last seven years and will end in an orbit that will lead the probe to less than 3.83 million kilometers from the sun's surface, several times closer than what had been reached before, according to the press release.

The probe will face brutal heat and radiation conditions, while providing humanity with closer observations of an unprecedented star and helping us understand the phenomena that have puzzled scientists for decades.

The observations will add essential knowledge to NASA's efforts to understand the sun, where changing conditions can propagate in the solar system, affecting the Earth and other worlds, states of liberation.

The discoveries of the probe are particularly important for human life on Earth.

They will help researchers improve forecasts of space weather phenomena that can damage satellites and astronauts in orbit, disrupt radio communications and, in the most severe cases, overload the network with trigger states.