A spacecraft is about to fly into the sun’s atmosphere for the first time

Almost no one writes about Parker solar probe already.

Of course, the spacecraft attracted some attention when it launched. After all, it is the fastest moving object humans have ever created. At its maximum speed, driven by the sun’s gravitational pull, the probe reaches a speed of 430,000 miles per hour, or more than one-sixth of 1 percent of the speed of light. That kind of speed will take you from New York to Tokyo in less than a minute.

And the Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft to be named after a living person. During its August 2018 launch. physicist Eugene Parker was 91 years old.

But in the six years since the probe floated through space and flew to the sun? Not so much. Let’s face it, the astrophysical properties of the sun and its complex structure are not something most people think about on a daily basis.

However, the tiny probe — weighing less than a metric ton and its science payload only about 110 pounds (50 kg) — is about to make its star. Quite literally. On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach to the sun. It will come within just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the Sun’s surface, flying into the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time.

Yes, it will get pretty hot. Scientists estimate that the probe’s heat shield will withstand temperatures in excess of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,371 C) on Christmas Eve, nearly the polar opposite of the North Pole.

Going straight to the source

I spoke to NASA’s chief science officer, Nicky Fox, to find out why the probe is being tortured like this. Before moving to NASA headquarters, Fox was a project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, and she explained that scientists really wanted to understand the origin of the solar wind.

This is the stream of charged particles that come out of the sun’s outermost layer, the corona. Scientists have wondered about this mystery for more than half a century, Fox explained.

“Honestly, we want to find the birthplace of the solar wind,” she said.

Back in the 1950s, before we had satellites or spacecraft to measure the properties of the sun, Parker predicted the existence of this solar wind. The scientific community was quite skeptical of this idea—many actually scoffed at Parker—until the Mariner 2 mission began measuring the solar wind in 1962.

As the scientific community began to embrace Parker’s theory, they wanted to know more about the solar wind, which is such a fundamental component of the entire solar system. Although the solar wind is invisible to the naked eye, when you see an aurora on Earth, it is the solar wind that interacts with the Earth’s magnetosphere in a particularly violent way.