A total of 24 times the NASA probe "Parker Solar Probe" is supposed to fly through the atmosphere of the sun. From October 31 to November 11, 2018 she made her first flight. Now Nasa has released the first pictures of the record flight.
On November 8, a photograph was taken of the probe, which was located 27 million kilometers from the Sun - and thus in its outer atmosphere, the corona. It consists of high-energy gases that the sun exudes.
With the naked eye, the corona can only be seen from the earth as a radiance around the sun in the event of a total eclipse of the sun. The probe image, on the other hand, shows two violent particle streams of the sun up close. They shine brightly into the picture from the left.
The picture was made up of several consecutive photos. This results in an interesting effect: The round, white point just to the left of the center of the image is the large gas planet Jupiter. He was moving through the field of view of the camera at the time of the shot. This is how the black dots can be explained. There, too, Jupiter was at other times. When editing the image, he was then but calculated by the software.
"No one has ever seen anything like this," rejoiced project scientist Nour Raouafi from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, on the picture at the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington.
The "Parker Solar Probe" flew past the star as close to the star as no other probe. The previous record holder, the German-American mission "Helios", had had almost twice the distance in the 1970s. At the following orbits you will approach the sun even further.
Outside, the sunshine atmosphere is especially hot
Unlike what could be intuitively thought, it is hotter in the outer atmosphere layer of the sun than in the areas closer to the star. Up to 5.6 million degrees Celsius can prevail in the corona. On the sun's surface, on the other hand, the temperature is only 5500 degrees.
To date, researchers have not understood exactly why the sun's atmosphere is so hot outside. "Parker Solar Probe" aims to study the phenomenon more closely by measuring particles and magnetic and electric fields in the corona.
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / NASA / dpa
"Parker Solar Probe" (computer graphics)
The probe must withstand temperatures of about 1370 degrees Celsius. An almost twelve centimeters thick carbon armor protects them from too much radiation. The particle fluxes of the sun are sometimes so strong that they can influence the magnetic field of the earth. Experts fear that if a particularly violent solar storm hit Earth, it could cause trillions of dollars in damage (read more here).
On further flights, the probe is to approach the sun up to 6.2 million kilometers. The next corona flight is scheduled for April 2019. Then the probe should send even more data from the first investigation, which currently does not arrive due to an unfavorable position.
The sun is, so to speak, between the "Parker Solar Probe" and the Earth. But the data is not lost. The probe has enough storage capacity to cache the measurement data of two full orbits onboard, the researchers said.
The probe has been on the way since August 2018. In future it will also clarify how solar winds are extremely accelerated within a short time. Some of the sun's most energetic particles shoot into space at more than half the speed of light.