parkersolarprobe
Latest
NASA's Parker Solar Probe got closer to the sun than ever before
The mission of NASA's Parker Solar Probe is to help us answer some major questions we have about the sun, and to do that, it's getting closer to the sun, or any star, than a spacecraft has ever been. Between October 31st and November 11th, the probe conducted its first solar encounter, swooping to within 16.9 million miles of the sun's surface and entering its atmosphere, or the corona. And now, we have the first image from that encounter, one that NASA scientists shared at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union this week.
NASA launches Parker Solar Probe in mission to 'touch' the Sun
After a few delays, the Sun-chasing Parker Solar Probe is on its way. NASA launched the spacecraft aboard a ULA Delta IV Heavy rocket at 3:31AM Eastern this morning (August 12th) and confirmed that the vessel was healthy at 5:33AM. The probe still has a ways to go before it's conducting scientific studies. It'll spend its first week in space deploying its high-gain antenna, the first part of its electric field antennas and its magnetometer. In early September, the probe will start a roughly four-week instrument shakedown to be sure it's ready for science gathering.
Watch the launch of NASA's Parker Solar Probe Sunday morning (update)
Tomorrow, August 11th, NASA is scheduled to launch a historic mission called the Parker Solar Probe. The spacecraft will launch on a ULA Delta IV Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral in Florida at 3:33 AM ET on Saturday morning; the launch window will last for 65 minutes. You can watch it happen on the NASA TV live stream below.
The fastest human-made object launches for the Sun this Saturday
If the weather remains favorable and everything goes according to plan on August 11th, NASA is sending a spacecraft to the sun. The Parker Solar Probe will go closer to the massive ball of gas and plasma keeping our solar system together than any other spacecraft has gone before. It will brave extreme temperatures reaching up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit to collect data and images of the sun's atmosphere called "corona." The spacecraft will also reach speeds up to 430,000 mph, making it the fastest-ever human-made object. That's nowhere near fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri within our lifetime -- it has to travel around 7,000 years to reach the star closest to our sun -- but fast enough to get from Philadelphia to DC in a second.
Scientists discover structure within the Sun's atmosphere
While scientists have been learning more and more about our solar system and the way things work, many of our Sun's mechanics still remain a mystery. In advance of the launch of the Parker Solar Probe, which will make contact with the Sun's outer atmosphere, however, scientists are foreshadowing what the spacecraft might see with new discoveries. In a paper published this week in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists detected structures within the Sun's corona, thanks to advanced image processing techniques and algorithms.
NASA's sun-bound probe just got a super heat-resistant shield
NASA's sun-bound Parker Solar Probe was already set to fare better than Icarus, but it just got some serious fortification. The space agency has announced that the vessel has been fitted with an eight-foot Thermal Protection Shield that will be exposed to temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit when the probe flirts with the hottest star in our solar system in late 2024.
NASA’s first mission to touch the sun launches in 2018
Today, NASA announced the details of a mission that will take us directly into the sun's corona. Nicola Fox, the Mission Project Scientist for the Parker Solar Probe Mission at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, revealed the probe's mission to the public: to touch, measure, and analyze the atmosphere of our sun.
