A risky NASA mission is sending a spacecraft hurtling within spitting distance of the sun
“We will be almost landing on the star," says Nour Raouafi, project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe and an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. , the peak of its 11-year cycle of storminess. It’s been hurling great blobs of charged particles at Earth on a regular basis, intensifying the high-latitude auroras.
There’s also a more subtle agenda in this mission: advancing American aerospace prowess. The technological innovations can be applied to future space endeavors at a time when many countries are sending probes to the moon, Mars and elsewhere in the solar system.“It’s whether we stay at the top of the world, or somebody else will step in,” said Nour Raouafi, project scientist for the mission and an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
“We, ourselves, are living in that environment. But we don’t feel it because we have a geomagnetic field that shields us from these hazardous energetic particles and these explosions from the sun,” Raouafi said. “That’s why we have life on Earth.” And there’s another reason the spacecraft doesn’t turn into molten goo: Although the temperature of the sun’s atmosphere can reach millions of degrees, the density is low, so an object flying through that realm of space won’t heat up easily.This shield will only work, however, if it is always directly facing the sun, with the vulnerable hardware behind it fully shaded. That requires precision navigation with multiple cameras that use the “fixed” stars as guides.
The probe has already gathered abundant data about the sun’s corona, the ethereal outermost layer of the sun that’s normally invisible to human eyes. The total eclipse on April 8 will offer people on Earth a rare chance to glimpse the corona when the moon fully blocks the main disk of our blazing star.
The tensest moments for the mission are when the spacecraft swings around the sun and temporarily cannot receive commands. That will happen this coming December during the closest encounter: For days, the team won’t know if the spaceship survived.
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