REAL LIFE NEWS: FLYING INTO THE SUN
by Hazed
NASA is sending a mission to the edge of the sun. (This obviously makes me think of the Pink Floyd song ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun; you can see a video of the song accompanied by some amazing images here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zuEfmmCA5s.)
The Parker Solar Probe will take off on August 4 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket. It will head towards the sun, and will fly closer to it than any previous missions, dipping into the edge of the sun’s corona where the temperature is around 1,400C (seven times hotter than the hottest kitchen oven).
There are many mysteries about the sun that scientists would love to solve. The most puzzling is the fact that the sun’s surface is around 6,000C but the corona is an enormous three million degrees. Since the corona takes its heat from the sun’s surface, there’s no way it can be hotter than the surface. Except that it is, and we don’t know why. To find out, we need to get a spacecraft down into the corona.
PSP will fly past Venus in September then drop towards the sun for its first close pass on 1 November. Over time its orbit will see it creep closer and closer until it skims just 6km above the surface of the sun.
The data that we get from this mission is sure to be fascinating and I look forward to reporting on it in the future.
This reminds me of the old joke: when planning a mission to the sun, someone asked the scientists how they would avoid getting burned up. “!t’s OK,” was the reply, “we’re going at night.”
It also makes me wonder if they will find the ATM that lives behind the sun (at least it does in Fed DataSpace).
