NASA’s Parker probe managed to touch the sun for the first time in history

An important new teacher in The history of astronauticsto. For the first time, a ship managed “Touch” the sun, the great star of the solar system. He was ‘lucky’ NASA’s Parker SpacecraftIt was launched into space in 2018. Three years later it managed to reach through the sun’s upper atmosphere, known as the corona.

Once he arrived, he sampled the particles and magnetic fields. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) classifies this event as The culmination of the Parker Solar Probe project and a ‘big step for solar energy science’. It was during the eighth approach to the sun, in April of this year 2021.

Flying close to the sun, Parker Solar Probe is now spotting Conditions in the magnetically-dominated layer of the solar atmosphere – The crown – which we weren’t able to before. We can see the spacecraft fly through the coronal structures It can be observed during a total solar eclipse‘, as he says in a NASA statement Nour Al-Rawafi, a project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

A long way

probe Parker Solar Probe It was launched into space in 2018. Its goal is to explore and reach the mysteries that surround the sun travel closer than any other spacecraft so far. The history of the journey traveled goes back decades, when it was undertaken at the first conception of this ambitious project which is now underway.

While it is hoped to obtain vital information about The closest star to Earth and its impact on the entire solar system. Unlike our planet, the sun does not have a solid surface, but it does have a solid surface The atmosphere is extremely hot, consisting of a substance bound together by gravity and magnetic forces. When heat and pressure push it away from the sun, it reaches a point where gravity and magnetic fields are too weak to contain them.

two thousand surface

This point is known as Critical surface by Alfvén It marks the end of the solar atmosphere and the beginning of the solar wind. There, solar materials with energy to go beyond It turns into winds, which carry away the sun’s magnetic field At his side as he races across the solar system to Earth. Beyond this surface, the wind moves very fast The waves inside the wind can’t travel fast enough I would love to go back.

Until now it was not the exact point where he did not know this surface. According to the distant pictures Created between 10 and 20 solar radii from the surface of the Sun: between 4.3 and 8.6 million miles. Thanks to its trajectory, the probe was able to approach within less than 20 radii. s On April 28, 2021, during the eighth flight over the sun, the Parker Probe had the necessary particle and magnetic conditions at 18.8 solar radii (about 8.1 million miles; 13 million km) above the surface of the Sun.

With this they achieved, For the first time in history, to cross the critical surface of Alfvén and enter the solar atmosphere. “We totally expected that sooner or later we would meet the Crown for at least a little while,” says Justin Kasper, a professor at the University of Michigan. “I’m excited to see What Parker found in the next few years “Because it frequently passes through the solar corona,” says Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division. A new approach to the sun will take place in January 2022.