Almost no one writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore.
Sure, the spacecraft attracted some attention after launch. After all, it is the fastest moving object ever built by man. At its maximum speed, constrained by the Sun’s gravitational pull, the spacecraft reaches a speed of 700,000 km per hour, or more than one-sixth of 1 percent the speed of delicate. At this speed, you can get from Novel York to Tokyo in less than a minute.
Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person. At the time of its launch in August 2018, physicist Eugene Parker was 91 years elderly.
But in the six years since the probe flew through space and flew past the sun? Not so much. Let’s face it, the astrophysical properties of the sun and its convoluted structure are not something most people think about on a daily basis.
But the petite probe – it weighs less than a metric ton and has a science payload of only about 110 pounds (50 kg) – will soon spin into a star. Quite literally. On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach to the Sun to date. It will fly to a distance of just 6.1 million km from the solar surface and enter the solar atmosphere for the first time.
Yes, it will be quite heated. Scientists estimate that the spacecraft’s heat shield will withstand temperatures exceeding 1,371 degrees Celsius on Christmas Eve, essentially the polar opposite of the North Pole.
Going straight to the Source
I spoke to NASA’s chief science officer, Nicky Fox, to understand why the spacecraft is being tortured so much. Before moving to NASA headquarters, Fox was a project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe and explained that scientists really want to understand the origins of the solar wind.
It is a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun’s outermost layer, the corona. Fox explained that scientists have been pondering this particular mystery for more than half a century.
“We just want to find the birthplace of the solar wind,” she said.
Back in the 1950s, before satellites and spacecraft existed to measure the Sun’s properties, Parker predicted the existence of this solar wind. The scientific community was quite skeptical of the idea – many ridiculed Parker – until the Mariner 2 mission began measuring the solar wind in 1962.
As the scientific community began to accept Parker’s theory, they wanted to learn more about the solar wind, which is the fundamental component of the entire solar system. Although the solar wind is imperceptible to the naked eye, when you see the aurora borealis on Earth, it is the solar wind interacting with Earth’s magnetosphere in a particularly violent way.