The NASA Parker Solar Probe, a $1.5 billion car-sized spacecraft, was successfully launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral air base in a seven-year mission to explore the Sun’s outer-atmosphere. The spacecraft will pass within 3.8 million miles of the sun’s visible surface, enduring 2,500-degree heat while passing the star at a record 430,000 mph.
The mission is to help scientists figure out what makes the sun’s corona — the shimmering halo of the outer atmosphere — hotter than the sun’s visible surface. Additionally, scientists seek to find out what accelerates the sun’s charged particles to such large velocities, which produce solar wind that streams away from the corona in different directions.
The sun’s visible surface has a temperature of about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the corona has a temperature that shoots up to several million degrees.
Due to Parker’s heat shield and the weak outer atmosphere of ionized gas, the spacecraft will not experience most of the corona’s extreme heat. It will, however, get hotter than the temperature of lava while its instruments study the surrounding environment in detail.
Scientists also hope that learning more about the sun’s solar wind will help them better predict the effects of solar storms and the impact of solar wind on Earth’s magnetic field.
The spacecraft is named after U.S. astrophysicist Eugene Parker, the University of Chicago astrophysicist who first developed the theory of the solar wind in 1958. Now 91 years of age, Parker, the first living scientist to have a space probe named in his honor, flew to Cape Canaveral to witness his first rocket launch.
Parker Solar Probe, which is expected to complete 24 orbits of the Sun, will use Venus to adjust its course. The spacecraft will fly past Venus in October, thus setting up its first solar encounter in November.
By: Maytinee Kraymer
