During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s corona and prominences are visible to the naked eye [image credit: Luc Viatour / https://Lucnix.be ]
Perhaps the probe will be able to shed some light, so to speak, on the Sun’s famous coronal heating problem.
On Aug. 6, the Parker Solar Probe will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for one extremely intense mission: to fly closer to the sun than any spacecraft before, reports CBC News.
The probe will fly through and study the sun’s atmosphere, where it will face punishing heat and radiation. At its closest, it will come within 6.1 million kilometres of the sun.
“A lot of people don’t think that’s particularly close,” said Nicola Fox, the project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe. “But if I put the sun and the Earth in the end zones in a football field, the Parker Solar Probe will be on the four-yard line in the red zone, knocking on the door for a touchdown.”
Named after astrophysicist Eugene Parker — the first living researcher to receive such an honour — the probe will travel in the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona.
Because it isn’t very dense, the corona is difficult to study. The only time we can see it is during a solar eclipse, or with a specially made instrument called a coronagraph, which blocks out the sun’s light.
While the sun is vital to our existence, it’s not really our ally. It is a roiling, churning ball of gas and charged particles that generates a solar wind that influences our planet — and not always in a good way.
Solar flares are one example. These eruptions occur in cooler regions of the sun, called sunspots. Just like Earth, the sun has a magnetic field. But unlike Earth, different regions of the sun rotate at different speeds. This can cause magnetic loops to become tangled. After twisting tighter and tighter, the stored energy is released as a solar flare.
These are often followed by coronal mass ejections, where charged particles (plasma) erupt and travel at increased speeds along the solar wind.
These events can cause radio blackouts and even knock out power grids. One of the most well known is the power outage that left six million people shivering in the dark in Quebec in March 1989.
“It’s of fundamental importance for us to be able to predict space weather much like we predict weather here on Earth,” said Alex Young, a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., during a news conference Friday.
With the Parker Solar Probe mission, scientists want to better understand these phenomena: the sun’s corona, magnetic field, solar flares and the wildly fast solar wind.
“The solar wind goes from a steady breeze to a supersonic flow from the corona to millions of miles an hour,” Young said. “So why does this happen? What is going on here?”
Continued here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
July 21, 2018 at 03:54AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 