NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Sends Back Data After Being The Closest To The Sun
New amazing images reach Earth from space. Just a few weeks after the Parker Solar Probe made its closest-ever flyby of the Sun, it’s sending home data.
There’s a remarkable image of the energetic gas/plasma flowing out from the star which we have to admit, it’s mind-blowing.
The bright dot that can be seen in the photo is Jupiter. The black dots, on the other hand, are repeats that are occurring because of the way in which the picture is constructed.
Parker’s WISPR instrument got this view
BBC reported that Parker’s WISPR instrument got this view just 27.2 million km from the surface of the Sun on November 8. It seems that the imager was looking out sideways from behind Parker’s thick heat shield.
This NASA mission has been launched back in August in order to study the Sun’s corona aka the outer atmosphere.
It seems that in a really strange way, the region is much hotter than the star’s surface aka the photosphere.
This can be about 6,000 degrees, and the outer atmosphere may reach massively high temperatures of millions of degrees.
The mechanisms that produce such enormous heat are not understood yet.
Parker is working on solving the puzzle
Parker’s primary goal is to solve this puzzle by passing through the outer atmosphere and directly sampling its particle, electric and magnetic fields.
“We need to go into this region to be able to sample the new plasma, the newly formed material, to be able to see what processes, what physics, is taking place in there,” explained Nicola Fox via CNN. She is the director of the Heliophysics Division at Nasa HQ in Washington DC.
She continued and explained that “We want to understand why there is this temperature inversion, as in – you walk away from a hot star, and the atmosphere gets hotter, not colder as you would expect.”
CNN reports that Parker broke records for proximity to the Sun, and it is also setting new speed records for a spacecraft. It was able to achieve 375,000km/h. The fastest any previous probe managed was about 250,000km/h.
I have been blogging and posting articles for over eight years, but my passion for writing dates back in 2000. I am especially enthusiastic about technology, science, and health-related issues. When I’m not researching and writing the latest news, I’m either watching sci-fi and horror movies or checking out places worth visiting and building deep memories for later in life. I believe in empathy and continually improving myself.
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