Solarprobe - Blog Posts

Parker Solar Probe is Go for Launch

Tomorrow, Aug. 11, we're launching a spacecraft to touch the Sun.

The first chance to launch Parker Solar Probe is 3:33 a.m. EDT on Aug. 11 from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Launch coverage on NASA TV starts at 3 a.m. EDT at nasa.gov/live.

After launch, Parker Solar Probe begins its daring journey to the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, going closer to the Sun than any spacecraft in history and facing brutal heat and radiation.

Though Parker Solar Probe weighs a mere 1,400 pounds — pretty light for a spacecraft — it's launching aboard one of the world's most powerful rockets, a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy with a third stage added.

Even though you might think the Sun's massive means things would just fall into it, it's surprisingly difficult to actually go there. Any object leaving Earth starts off traveling at about 67,000 miles per hour, same as Earth — and most of that is in a sideways direction, so you have to shed most of that sideways speed to make it to the Sun. All that means that it takes 55 times more launch energy to go to the Sun than it does to go to Mars. On top of its powerful launch vehicle, Parker Solar Probe will use seven Venus gravity assists to shed sideways speed.

Even though Parker Solar Probe will lose a lot of sideways speed, it'll still be going incredibly fast as its orbit draws closer to the Sun throughout its seven-year mission. At its fastest, Parker Solar Probe will travel at 430,000 miles per hour — fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. in one second — setting the record for the fastest spacecraft in history.

But the real challenge was to keep the spacecraft from frying once it got there.

We’ve always wanted to send a mission to the corona, but we literally haven’t had the technology that can protect a spacecraft and its instruments from its scorching heat. Only recent advances have enabled engineers to build a heat shield that will protect the spacecraft on this journey of extremes — a tricky feat that requires withstanding the Sun’s intense radiation on the front and staying cool at the back, so the spacecraft and instruments can work properly.

The 4.5-inches-thick heat shield is built like a sandwich. There’s a thin layer of carbon material like you might find in your golf clubs or tennis rackets, carbon foam, and then another thin piece of carbon-carbon on the back. Even while the Sun-facing side broils at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the back of the shield will remain a balmy 85 degrees — just above room temperature. There are so few particles in this region that it's a vacuum, so blocking the Sun's radiation goes a long way towards keeping the spacecraft cool.

Parker Solar Probe is also our first mission to be named after a living individual: Dr. Eugene Parker, famed solar physicist who in 1958 first predicted the existence of the solar wind.

"Solar wind" is what Dr. Parker dubbed the stream of charged particles that flows constantly from the Sun, bathing Earth and our entire solar system in the Sun’s magnetic fields. Parker Solar Probe’s flight right through the corona allows it to observe the birth of the very solar wind that Dr. Parker predicted, right as it speeds up and over the speed of sound.  

The corona is where solar material is heated to millions of degrees and where the most extreme eruptions on the Sun occur, like solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which fling particles out to space at incredible speeds near the speed of light. These explosions can also spark space weather storms near Earth that can endanger satellites and astronauts, disrupt radio communications and, at their most severe, trigger power outages.

Thanks to Parker Solar Probe’s landmark mission, solar scientists will be able to see the objects of their study up close and personal for the very first time.

Up until now, all of our studies of the corona have been remote — that is, taken from a distance, rather than at the mysterious region itself. Scientists have been very creative to glean as much as possible from their remote data, but there’s nothing like actually sending a probe to the corona to see what’s going on.

And scientists aren’t the only ones along for the adventure — Parker Solar Probe holds a microchip carrying the names of more than 1.1 million people who signed up to send their name to the Sun. This summer, these names and 1,400 pounds of science equipment begin their journey to the center of our solar system.

Three months later in November 2018, Parker Solar Probe makes its first close approach to the Sun, and in December, it will send back the data. The corona is one of the last places in the solar system where no spacecraft has visited before; each observation Parker Solar Probe makes is a potential discovery.

Stay tuned — Parker Solar Probe is about to take flight.

Keep up with the latest on the mission at nasa.gov/solarprobe or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

Spilling the Sun’s Secrets

You might think you know the Sun: It looks quiet and unchanging. But the Sun has secrets that scientists have been trying to figure out for decades.  

One of our new missions — Parker Solar Probe — is aiming to spill the Sun’s secrets and shed new light on our neighbor in the sky.

Even though it’s 93 million miles away, the Sun is our nearest and best laboratory for understanding the inner workings of stars everywhere. We’ve been spying on the Sun with a fleet of satellites for decades, but we’ve never gotten a close-up of our nearest star.

This summer, Parker Solar Probe is launching into an orbit that will take it far closer to the Sun than any instrument has ever gone. It will fly close enough to touch the Sun, sweeping through the outer atmosphere — the corona — 4 million miles above the surface.

This unique viewpoint will do a lot more than provide gossip on the Sun. Scientists will take measurements to help us understand the Sun’s secrets — including those that can affect Earth.

Parker Solar Probe is equipped with four suites of instruments that will take detailed measurements from within the Sun's corona, all protected by a special heat shield to keep them safe and cool in the Sun's ferocious heat.

The corona itself is home to one of the Sun’s biggest secrets: The corona's mysteriously high temperatures. The corona, a region of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, is hundreds of times hotter than the surface below. That's counterintuitive, like if you got warmer the farther you walked from a campfire, but scientists don’t yet know why that's the case.

Some think the excess heat is delivered by electromagnetic waves called Alfvén waves moving outwards from the Sun’s surface. Others think it might be due to nanoflares — bomb-like explosions that occur on the Sun’s surface, similar to the flares we can see with telescopes from Earth, but smaller and much more frequent. Either way, Parker Solar Probe's measurements direct from this region itself should help us pin down what's really going on.

We also want to find out what exactly accelerates the solar wind — the Sun's constant outpouring of material that rushes out at a million miles per hour and fills the Solar System far past the orbit of Pluto. The solar wind can cause space weather when it reaches Earth — triggering things like the aurora, satellite problems, and even, in rare cases, power outages.

We know where the solar wind comes from, and that it gains its speed somewhere in the corona, but the exact mechanism of that acceleration is a mystery. By sampling particles directly at the scene of the crime, scientists hope Parker Solar Probe can help crack this case.

Parker Solar Probe should also help us uncover the secrets of some of the fastest particles from the Sun. Solar energetic particles can reach speeds of more than 50% the speed of light, and they can interfere with satellites with little warning because of how fast they move. We don't know how they get so fast — but it's another mystery that should be solved with Parker Solar Probe on the case.  

Parker Solar Probe launches summer 2018 on a seven-year mission to touch the Sun. Keep up with the latest on the Sun at @NASASun on Twitter, and follow along with Parker Solar Probe's last steps to launch at nasa.gov/solarprobe.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Why Won’t Our Parker Solar Probe Melt?

This summer, our Parker Solar Probe will launch to travel closer to the Sun than any mission before it, right into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona.

The environment in the corona is unimaginably hot: The spacecraft will travel through material with temperatures greater than 3 million degrees Fahrenheit. 

So…why won’t it melt? 

The Difference Between Heat and Temperature

Parker Solar Probe was designed from the ground up to keep its instruments safe and cool, but the nature of the corona itself also helps. The key lies in the difference between heat and temperature.

Temperature measures how fast particles are moving, while heat is the total amount of energy that they transfer. The corona is an incredibly thin and tenuous part of the Sun, and there are very few particles there to transfer energy – so while the particles are moving fast (high temperature), they don't actually transfer much energy to the spacecraft (low heat).

It's like the difference between putting your hand in a hot oven versus putting it in a pot of boiling water (don’t try this at home!). In the air of the oven, your hand doesn't get nearly as hot as it would in the much denser water of the boiling pot. 

So even though Parker Solar Probe travels through a region with temperatures of several million degrees, the surface of its heat shield will reach only about 2,500 F.

The Heat Shield

Of course, thousands of degrees Fahrenheit is still way too hot for scientific instruments. (For comparison, lava from volcano eruptions can be anywhere between 1,300 to 2,200 F.) 

To withstand that heat, Parker Solar Probe is outfitted with a cutting-edge heat shield, called the Thermal Protection System. This heat shield is made of a carbon composite foam sandwiched between two carbon plates. The Sun-facing side is covered with a specially-developed white ceramic coating, applied as a plasma spray, to reflect as much heat as possible.

The heat shield is so good at its job that even though the Sun-facing side of the shield will be at 2,500 F, the instruments in its shadow will remain at a balmy 85 F.

Parker Solar Probe Keeps its Cool

Several other designs on the spacecraft help Parker Solar Probe beat the heat. 

Parker Solar Probe is not only studying the Sun – it's also powered by it. But even though most of the surface area of its solar arrays can be retracted behind the heat shield, even that small exposed segment would quickly make them overheat while at the Sun.  

To keep things cool, Parker Solar Probe circulates a single gallon of water through its solar arrays. The water absorbs heat as it passes behind the arrays, then radiates that heat out into space as it flows into the spacecraft's radiator. 

It's also important for Parker Solar Probe to be able to think on its feet, since it takes about eight minutes for information to travel between Earth and the Sun. If we had to control the spacecraft from Earth, by the time we knew something went wrong, it would be too late to fix it. 

So Parker Solar Probe is smart: Along the edges of the heat shield's shadow are seven sensors. If any of these sensors detect sunlight, they alert the central computer and the spacecraft can correct its position to keep the sensors – and the rest of the instruments – safely protected behind the heat shield.

Over the course of its seven-year mission, Parker Solar Probe will make 24 orbits of our star. On each close approach to the Sun, it will sample the solar wind, study the Sun’s corona, and provide unprecedentedly close up observations from around our star – and armed with its slew of innovative technologies, we know it will keep its cool the whole time. 

Parker Solar Probe launches summer 2018 on its mission to study the Sun. Keep up with the latest on the mission at nasa.gov/solarprobe or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Tools of the Trade: How Parker Solar Probe Will Study the Sun

Our Parker Solar Probe will get closer to the Sun than any spacecraft has ever gone – it will fly right through the Sun's corona, part of the Sun's atmosphere.

This spacecraft is full of cutting-edge technology, from its heat shield down to its guidance and control systems. It also carries four suites of advanced instruments designed to study the Sun in a multitude of ways.  

1. Measuring particles

Two of Parker Solar Probe's instrument suites are focused on measuring particles – electrons and ions – within the corona.

One of these particle-measuring instrument suites is SWEAP (Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons). SWEAP counts the most common particles in the solar wind – the Sun's constant outflow of material – and measures their properties, like velocity, density and temperature. Gathering this information about solar wind particles will help scientists better understand why the solar wind reaches supersonic speeds and exactly which part of the Sun the particles come from.

One instrument in the SWEAP suite is the Solar Probe Cup. Most of the instruments on Parker Solar Probe stay safe and cool in the shadow of the heat shield, but the Solar Probe Cup is one of the few that sticks out. That's so it can capture and measure particles streaming straight out from the Sun, and it had to go through some intense testing to get ready for this position in the Sun's incredibly hot corona.  

Credit: Levi Hutmacher/Michigan Engineering

The ISʘIS suite (pronounced EE-sis, and including the symbol for the Sun in its acronym) also measures particles. ISʘIS is short for Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun, and this instrument suite measures particles that move faster – and therefore have more energy – than the solar wind.

These measurements will help scientists understand these particles' lifecycles – where they came from, how they got to be traveling so fast (these particles can reach speeds more than half the speed of light!) and what path they take as they travel away from the Sun and into interplanetary space.

2. Taking pictures – but not of the Sun's surface.

WISPR (Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe) has the only two cameras on Parker Solar Probe – but they're not pointed directly at the Sun. Instead, WISPR looks out the side of the spacecraft, in the direction it's traveling, looking at the space Parker Solar Probe is about to fly through. From that vantage point, WISPR captures images of structures within the corona like coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. CMEs are clouds of solar material that occasionally explode from the Sun at millions of miles per hour. Because this solar material is magnetized, CMEs can trigger geomagnetic storms when they reach Earth – which, in turn, can cause effects like auroras and even, in extreme cases, power outages.  

Right now, our observations of events like these come from satellites orbiting near Earth, so WISPR will give us a whole new perspective. And, scientists will be able to combine WISPR's images with Parker Solar Probe's direct particle measurements to get a better idea of how these structures change as they travel.

3. Studying electric & magnetic fields

The FIELDS instrument suite is appropriately named: It's what scientists will use to study the electric and magnetic fields in the corona.

Electric and magnetic fields are key to understanding what happens, not only on the Sun, but throughout space, because they are the primary driver accelerating charged particles. In particular, a process called magnetic reconnection – when magnetic field lines explosively realign, sending particles rocketing away at incredible speeds – is thought to drive solar explosions, as well as space weather effects on Earth, like the aurora.

FIELDS measures electric and magnetic field at high time resolution, meaning it takes lots of measurements in a short amount of time, to track these processes and shed some light on the mechanics underlying the Sun's behavior. FIELDS' measurements are precisely synced up with those of the SWEAP suite (one of the sets of instruments studying particles) so that scientists can match up the immediate effects that electric and magnetic fields have on the material of the solar wind.

Parker Solar Probe launches summer 2018 on its mission to study the Sun. Keep up with the latest on the mission at nasa.gov/solarprobe or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Meet Parker Solar Probe, Our Mission to Touch the Sun

In just a few weeks, we're launching a spacecraft to get closer to the Sun than any human-made object has ever gone.

The mission, called Parker Solar Probe, is outfitted with a lineup of instruments to measure the Sun's particles, magnetic and electric fields, solar wind and more – all to help us better understand our star, and, by extension, stars everywhere in the universe.

Parker Solar Probe is about the size of a small car, and after launch – scheduled for no earlier than Aug. 6, 2018 – it will swing by Venus on its way to the Sun, using a maneuver called a gravity assist to draw its orbit closer to our star. Just three months after launch, Parker Solar Probe will make its first close approach to the Sun – the first of 24 throughout its seven-year mission.

Though Parker Solar Probe will get closer and closer to the Sun with each orbit, the first approach will already place the spacecraft as the closest-ever human-made object to the Sun, swinging by at 15 million miles from its surface. This distance places it well within the corona, a region of the Sun's outer atmosphere that scientists think holds clues to some of the Sun's fundamental physics.

For comparison, Mercury orbits at about 36 million miles from the Sun, and the previous record holder – Helios 2, in 1976 – came within 27 million miles of the solar surface. 

Humanity has studied the Sun for thousands of years, and our modern understanding of the Sun was revolutionized some 60 years ago with the start of the Space Age. We've come to understand that the Sun affects Earth in more ways than just providing heat and light – it's an active and dynamic star that releases solar storms that influence Earth and other worlds throughout the solar system. The Sun's activity can trigger the aurora, cause satellite and communications disruptions, and even – in extreme cases – lead to power outages.

Much of the Sun's influence on us is embedded in the solar wind, the Sun's constant outflow of magnetized material that can interact with Earth's magnetic field. One of the earliest papers theorizing the solar wind was written by Dr. Gene Parker, after whom the mission is named.

Though we understand the Sun better than we ever have before, there are still big questions left to be answered, and that's where scientists hope Parker Solar Probe will help.  

First, there's the coronal heating problem. This refers to the counterintuitive truth that the Sun's atmosphere – the corona – is much, much hotter than its surface, even though the surface is millions of miles closer to the Sun's energy source at its core. Scientists hope Parker Solar Probe's in situ and remote measurements will help uncover the mechanism that carries so much energy up into the upper atmosphere.

Second, scientists hope to better understand the solar wind. At some point on its journey from the Sun out into space, the solar wind is accelerated to supersonic speeds and heated to extraordinary temperatures. Right now, we measure solar wind primarily with a group of satellites clustered around Lagrange point 1, a spot in space between the Sun and Earth some 1 million miles from us. 

By the time the solar wind reaches these satellites, it has traveled about 92 million miles already, blending together the signatures that could shed light on the acceleration process. Parker Solar Probe, on the other hand, will make similar measurements less than 4 million miles from the solar surface – much closer to the solar wind's origin point and the regions of interest.

Scientists also hope that Parker Solar Probe will uncover the mechanisms at work behind the acceleration of solar energetic particles, which can reach speeds more than half as fast as the speed of light as they rocket away from the Sun! Such particles can interfere with satellite electronics, especially for satellites outside of Earth's magnetic field.

Parker Solar Probe will launch from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, adjacent to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Because of the enormous speed required to achieve its solar orbit, the spacecraft will launch on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy, one of the most powerful rockets in the world.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks to learn more about Parker Solar Probe's science and follow along with its journey to launch. We'll be posting updates here on Tumblr, on Twitter and Facebook, and at nasa.gov/solarprobe.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Craving some summer Sun? We're inviting people around the world to submit their names to be placed on a microchip that will travel to the Sun aboard Parker Solar Probe! 

Launching summer 2018, Parker Solar Probe will be our first mission to "touch" a star. The spacecraft - about the size of a small car - will travel right through the Sun's atmosphere, facing brutal temperatures and radiation as it traces how energy and heat move through the solar corona and explores what accelerates the solar wind and solar energetic particles.

Send your name along for the ride at go.nasa.gov/HotTicket! Submissions will be accepted through April 27, 2018. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

What's next for NASA? A quick look at some of the big things coming up:

1. We will add to our existing robotic fleet at the Red Planet with the InSight Mars lander set to study the planet's interior.

This terrestrial planet explorer will address one of the most fundamental issues of planetary and solar system science - understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.

2. The Mars 2020 rover will look for signs of past microbial life, gather samples for potential future return to Earth.

The Mars 2020 mission takes the next step by not only seeking signs of habitable conditions on the Red Planet in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life itself. The Mars 2020 rover introduces a drill that can collect core samples of the most promising rocks and soils and set them aside in a "cache" on the surface of Mars.

3. The James Webb Space Telescope will be the premier observatory of the next decade, studying the history of our Universe in infrared.

Webb will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own solar system.

4. The Parker Solar Probe will "touch the Sun," traveling closer to the surface than any spacecraft before.

This spacecraft, about the size of a small car, will travel directly into the sun's atmosphere about 4 million miles from our star's surface. Parker Solar Probe and its four suites of instruments – studying magnetic and electric fields, energetic particles, and the solar wind – will be protected from the Sun’s enormous heat by a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite heat shield.

5. Our OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrives at the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in August 2018, and will return a sample for study in 2023.

This mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth.

6. Launching in 2018, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets around 200,000 bright, nearby stars.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system (exoplanets), including those that could support life. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits.

7. A mission to Jupiter's ocean-bearing moon Europa is being planned for launch in the 2020s.

The mission will place a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter in order to perform a detailed investigation of Europa -- a world that shows strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust and which could host conditions favorable for life.

8. We will launch our first integrated test flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, known as Exploration Mission-1.

The Space Launch System rocket will launch with Orion atop it. During Exploration Mission-1, Orion will venture thousands of miles beyond the moon during an approximately three week mission.

9. We are looking at what a flexible deep space gateway near the Moon could be.

We’ve issued a draft announcement seeking U.S. industry-led studies for an advanced solar electric propulsion (SEP) vehicle capability. The studies will help define required capabilities and reduce risk for the 50 kilowatt-class SEP needed for the agency’s near-term exploration goals.

10. Want to know more? Read the full story.

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Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Mark your calendars for summer 2018: That's when we're launching a spacecraft to touch the sun. 

In honor of our first-ever mission to the heart of the solar system, this week we’re delving into the life and times of this powerful yellow dwarf star.

1. Meet Parker 

Parker Solar Probe, our first mission to go to the sun, is named after Eugene Parker, an American astrophysicist who first theorized that the sun constantly sends out a flow of particles and energy called the solar wind. This historic mission will explore one of the last regions of the solar system to be visited by a spacecraft and help scientists unlock answers to questions they've been pondering for more than five decades.

2. Extra SPF, Please 

Parker Solar Probe will swoop within 4 million miles of the sun's surface, facing heat and radiation like no spacecraft before it. The mission will provide new data on solar activity to help us better understand our home star and its activity - information that can improve forecasts of major space-weather events that could impact life on Earth.

3. Majorly Massive 

The sun is the center of our solar system and makes up 99.8 percent of the mass of the entire solar system. If the sun were as tall as a typical front door, Earth would be about the size of a nickel.

4. Different Spin 

Since the sun is not a solid body, different parts of the sun rotate at different rates. At the equator, the sun spins once about every 25 days, but at its poles the sun rotates once on its axis every 36 Earth days.

5. Can't Stand on It

The sun is a star and a star doesn't have a solid surface. Rather, it's a ball of ionized gas 92.1% hydrogen (H2) and 7.8% helium (He) held together by its own gravity.

6. Center of Attention 

The sun isn't a planet, so it doesn't have any moons. But, the sun is orbited by eight planets, at least five dwarf planets, tens of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds of thousands to trillions of comets and icy bodies.

7. It's Hot in There 

And we mean really, really hot. The temperature at the sun's core is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. However, its atmosphere, the corona, can reach temperatures of 3 million degrees. (That's as if it got hotter the farther away you got from a fire, instead of cooler!) Parker Solar Probe will help scientists solve the mystery of why the corona's temperature is so much higher than the surface.

8. Travel Conditions

The sun influences the entire solar system, so studying it helps us better understand the space weather that our astronauts and spacecraft travel through.

9. Life on the Sun? 

Better to admire from afar. Thanks to its hot, energetic mix of gases and plasma, the sun can't be home to living things. However, we can thank the sun for making life on Earth possible by providing the warmth and energy that supply Earth’s food chain.

10. Chance of a Lifetime 

Last but not least, don't forget that the first total solar eclipse to sweep across the U.S. from coast-to-coast since 1918 is happening on August 21, 2017. Our toolkit has you need to know to about it. 

Want to learn more? Read our full list of the 10 things to know this week about the solar system HERE.

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