Posted on 09/27/2017 7:18:03 AM PDT by Red Badger
The spacecraft will have to survive temperatures as high as 2,500 Fahrenheit (1,371 Celsius)
NASA Scientists have unveiled the Parker Solar Probe at a laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, on Monday (September 25).
This latest spacecraft is being prepared to make an unprecedented plunge into the sun's atmosphere.
"We're going to go into the corona, which is the home to many mysteries that have baffled scientists for decades and decades," explained project scientist Nicky Fox at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
The spacecraft will have to survive temperatures as high as 2,500 Fahrenheit (1,371 Celsius), impacts by supersonic particles and powerful radiation as it circles as close as 4 million miles (7 million km) to the sun.
Data sent back to Earth some 89 million miles (140 million km) away will help scientists figure out why the sun's atmosphere, or corona, is hotter than its surface.
The Parker Solar Probe's mission system engineer, Jim Kinnison, said there is still a lot of testing to do before its scheduled July 2018 launch.
"It's the reason why we're successful is because we try to think of everything," he told Reuters.
The mission, formerly known as the Solar Probe Plus, was approved in 2014.
The spacecraft was renamed to honor University of Chicago physicist Eugene Parker, who in 1958 correctly predicted the existence of the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles that come off the sun and permeate the solar system.
The spacecraft, designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University laboratory, will fly around Venus seven times to get itself into orbit around the sun in December 2024. NASA is paying about $1.5 billion to build and launch the spacecraft.
(Excerpt) Read more at mirror.co.uk ...
(Image: JHU/APL)
Video at link.................
IBTLAN
IBU
Go at night when it’s cooler
I don’t get it. Why are they doing it? How does any of this help Islam?
I would not, under any circumstances, f*** with the sun.
Leave it alone, dummies.
Everything except speaking coherent English.
Nice try! They should wait until the next solar eclipse
lol!...................
...or wait for the next eclipse!................
http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Videos.php#Animations
This must be one of the “climate change” projects. :-)
>>Go at night when its cooler<<
Hilarious comment.
Seriously though, this seems like a huge waste of $$$.
What’s the pool odds of another ‘bad conversion (damn those decimal places!)’ that sends the unit to ‘7 meters’?? /s
Enough sci-fi out there for them to rip-off a few ideas still...
“Leave it alone, dummies.”
I agree!
4,000,000 miles away is touching the sun?
I’m touching China!
They should use the Tom Selleck method and spray CO2 in front of the vehicle. This will cause the cloud to block out the sun, making it cooler as it approaches.
If they use the Al Gore method, the vehicle should get about a mile or so in the air before it burns up.
Yep.
Icarus.
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