Study of the Sun Earth Connection—Part II
Solar Probe+ is a heat resistant spacecraft that will plunge directly into the atmosphere of the Sun, prepared to sample the solar wind and magnetism that very little is known about—hopefully beginning its mission around 2015. With NASA making this a seven-year mission, the probe is still in pre-phase A stage with a lot to do for preparation.
The designing and building of the NASA probe is being done by John Hopkkin’s Applied Physics Lab (APL), an experienced company in sending probes toward the Sun—the Messenger spacecraft which just completed its first flyby of Mercury in January of 2008. The same heat resistant technology will be used on the new Solar Probe+, which also builds on an earlier 2005 APL design of the Solar Probe.
The radiation blasts coming from the sun’s corona have never been experienced before on any spacecraft, with the Solar Probe+ having a carbon-composite heat shield to withstand the near 2,000 degrees C. Solar powered, the liquid-cooled solar panels provide electricity that are able to retract behind the heat-shield when it becomes too intense. If a human were viewing the Sun at this close-up, the Sun would appear about 23 times wider than when we view it from Earth.
TWO MYSTERIES OF THE CORONA:
• The corona itself is the primary cause of the mission, with its high temperature a mystery as the Sun’s outer atmosphere registers more than a million degrees C than the star below it;. The temperature increases the further one moves away from the Sun instead of going closer. The surface of the Sun runs about 6,000 degrees C.
• The solar wind is another reason for the mission, with the Sun throwing a wind of charged particles about one million mph throughout the solar system. Everything in its path is influenced by these winds, with no organized winds close to the Sun yet there is a veritable gale blowing. The mission is to search out what kind of unknown agent gives the solar wind such a huge velocity. The Solar Probe+ will actually enter the corona area to find this out.
What will be involved in the probe are instruments meant to read and sense the Sun’s environment—a magnetometer, a plasma wave sensor, a dust detector, an electron/ion analyzer—all in-situ measurements to unravel the mysteries of the coronal heating and solar wind acceleration.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 7:39 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
