The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft likely touched the Sun’s atmosphere as early as April this year. It took a few months for this data to reach Earth, and then it took a few months for it to be confirmed. that writing foreign media.
Compared to landing on the moon
“Like landing on the moon, ‘touching’ the sun is a giant step for humanity,” a NASA employee said during a press release yesterday.
The Parker Solar Probe, which was launched more than three years ago, is conducting research into the sun and the solar wind. Solar wind is a type of flame that shoots the sun away. They take with them clouds of plasma. Plasma clouds are streams of charged particles that are constantly ejected by the Sun on all planets. If those could penetrate the atmosphere, we could see them in the form of the aurora borealis and aurora borealis.
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The satellite can reach record speeds of up to 700,000 kilometers per hour. This would allow him to fly from Groningen to Utrecht in one second and from Europe to Australia in two minutes. We explained earlier In an article about the space probe.
Scientists saw that the probe flew through the atmosphere around the sun up to three times in a span of five hours in late April. It happened about 13 million kilometers from the sun. That still sounds a lot farther, but it’s much closer than a spacecraft has ever gotten. By comparison, the Earth is approximately 150 million km from the Sun.
Elliptical corridors around the sun
The probe orbits the sun in elliptical orbits. In the future, Parker should be able to get much closer to the Sun, about 6 million km from the Sun.
Parker is built to withstand temperatures of up to 1,400°C. The radiation at the destination is about 500 times brighter than the radiation on Earth. A special shield protects the probe against it.
