A new era in solar exploration is inaugurated. The Parker probe will be as close to the surface of the Sun as humanity has ever achieved. The mission will be launched in 2018 to enter the solar atmosphere, called the corona . And it will do so at a historic distance, 7 times closer than any other probe has ever been to its surface, 6 million kilometers away . The Parker Probe mission will fly at a speed of nearly seven hundred thousand kilometers per hour, the equivalent of a trip from New York to Tokyo in one minute.
The objective of the mission is to study how our star works, to predict the consequences of its climate on our planet and to try to answer questions still unanswered, such as ” why is the Sun’s atmosphere 300 times hotter than its surface “, said Nicola Fox of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
The historic mission is the result of 60 years of work by hundreds of scientists and engineers , since the researcher Eugene N. Parker developed the theory of solar winds and the solar corona in 1958. “The answer to why it took us 60 years to get so close to the Sun is that we simply did not have the right materials, ” explains Fox. The Parker probe is made of a carbon shield 11.43 centimeters thick, and it will have to withstand more than one and a half million degrees Celsius temperature of the solar corona and the more than five thousand five hundred degrees Celsius at which the surface is.
In fact, the mission has just been renamed from Solar Probe Plus to Parker Probe , in honor of the astrophysicist. During the announcement, Parker also received the United States’ Distinguished Public Service Medal , the highest civilian honor given to non-military government employees, within days of his 90th birthday. The scientist has called the mission ” heroic” . For its part, NASA has dubbed it the first human expedition to “touch” the Sun.
