Probe That Will Survive A Trip To The Sun

Building A Probe

That Will Survive 

A Trip To The Sun

The Parker Solar Probe is going to go closer to the sun than any spacecraft has come before. It will take seven years to fly 93 million miles to reach the sun’s corona, its outermost atmosphere. The probe will withstand temperatures up to 2,500º F as it gathers data about how energy and heat travel through the corona and what’s up with solar wind. We meet the engineer whose work on the heat shield will protect the probe from being burnt to a crisp as it makes history.

How Three New Tools Will Revolutionize Our Understanding of the Sun

Two spacecrafts and a telescope are set to jumpstart a new age of solar astronomy

The sun may be our closest star but it has managed to keep a few big secrets hidden. Now a trio of solar telescopes are kicking off a new era of solar astronomy that has scientists excited about major potential discoveries. NASA's Parker Solar Probe is currently on its way to “touch” the sun—the spacecraft will make the closest orbit around Earth's nearest star, flying through the sun’s atmosphere, in 2025. The Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft launched as part of a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, will become the first mission to study the solar poles. Back on Earth, the National Science Foundation (NSF's) Daniel K. Inouye telescope will make the most detailed ground-based observations of the sun, providing broader context for the pair of satellites.

[These missions] will revolutionize solar physics during this decade," Yannis Zouganelis, deputy project scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission, writes in an email.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-three-new-tools-will-revolutionize-our-understanding-sun-180975650