Here comes the sun

It seems like years since it’s been clear

FOR A generation or two, NASA has wanted to reach out and touch the sun. It’s had to settle for the moon, and for objects farther away. The probe called Voyager I, launched in the 1970s, is thought to have broken free of the solar system in 2012 and is high-tailing it through interstellar space.

But that’s the easy part: getting away from the sun.

Until now, it was impossible to get close to the sun because technology didn’t allow it. Tin cans tend to melt when they fly past Mercury. These days, however, science has come up with the right shields to allow an unmanned probe to “touch the sun”—but really just get close enough to study some things.

What things? Science things. It’s all very fascinating, even if NASA is the outfit explaining it all.

The so-called Parker Solar Probe will measure the sun’s magnetic fields, take pictures of the “solar structure,” and study the solar wind.

Scientists want answers on a few things. The first question is why the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, is so much hotter than the very surface of the sun itself. As one mission scientist told the papers: “It shouldn’t happen.” Like water flowing uphill. The second question is something about how the solar wind increases speed. (And when it comes by Earth, it can be doing a million miles an hour.)

The capsule won’t have an AC unit. But it will have heat shields. The 4.5-inch thick shield is made of some kind of carbon-composite material, and it’ll deflect the 2,500 degrees homo faber expects it to encounter. All the while the gadgets inside the probe are expected to hum along at room temperature.

The probe will reach 450,000 mph while on its passes by the sun. At that speed, you could get from Little Rock to Memphis in one second.

Amazing.

The Parker Solar Probe is scheduled to launch next year.

MAN THE Toolmaker, Man the Voyager, Man the Knowing, even Man the Player starts first with man. As you might have guessed, the Parker Solar Probe was named after a scientist, astrophysicist Eugene Parker. It’s the first time a NASA spacecraft has been named after a living individual.

Word has it that the esteemed Parker published some research back in 1958 that predicted the existence of something he called solar wind. At the time, scientists assumed the space between planets and moons and stars was just a big vacuum. Parker’s work was dismissed. Less than two years later, his theory was confirmed. And solar wind can affect everything from satellites in space to the power grid down here on the ground. The Parker Solar Probe may give us more information on it all.

To the stars and beyond!