How Will the Parker Solar Probe Withstand the Heat?
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has officially launched, and over the course of a seven-year mission, Parker will orbit the Sun 24 times, with its final three orbits coming as close as 3.9 million miles from our star’s surface. This is about 4 percent the distance between Earth and the Sun.
An important mission for Asgardia as they work toward their goals of ensuring the peaceful use of space for everyone and creating a demilitarized and free scientific base of knowledge in space.
Nour Raouafi, Parker Solar Probe Deputy Project Scientist, explained that the probe would not only make history by answering questions that have plagued scientists for many years, but it could also lead to the discovery of new phenomena that are entirely unknown to us now.
But how will the Parker Solar Probe get so close to the sun without melting?
Raouafi explained that a shield would protect the probe and the majority of the payload from the Sun’s heat, which will be as high as 500 times what we feel on Earth.
The heat shield is composed of carbon composites, and it must be positioned between the spacecraft and the Sun’s corona at all times during these close encounters. If the shield is misaligned even for a moment, the probe will melt in mere seconds.
So how come carbon doesn’t melt under such high temperatures? The reason comes down to a fundamental difference between heat and temperature. Temperature describes the kinetic energy of molecules, so higher temperatures mean molecules move faster. But heat is the transfer of energy between molecules.
Just outside the Sun’s atmosphere is the emptiness of space. Here there are few molecules to collide with Parker’s Sun shield and transfer heat to the device. NASA predicts the shield will only reach temperatures of 2,500 degrees F. While on the other side of the 4.5-inch thick carbon shield, the body of the spacecraft will sit at a comfortable 85 degrees F.
Parker comes equipped with four different instruments, which will study the Sun’s electric and magnetic fields, plasma, and energetic particles, in addition to imaging its solar wind. The only tools that must brave the heat of the Sun, protruding from behind the safety of the shield, are electric field antennas and a small plasma detector. The wires of these tools are built out of robust niobium and encased in a protective layer of sapphire crystal tubes.
On top of exploring the interesting temperature differences between the Sun’s surface and corona, scientists are especially eager to understand what accelerates solar wind (composed of charged particles given off from the Sun, like protons and electrons). When the particles are spewed toward Earth with sufficient strength, the effect can disrupt radio communications, harm satellites, and in extreme cases, interfere with power grids. Solar wind can attain speeds of 1.8 million miles per hour — but how the particles are accelerated to such speeds is still unanswered.
But as Raouafi said the state of solar wind is significantly affected during its journey toward Earth and beyond by a number of other physical processes, which mask entirely what caused the heating and acceleration of the plasma in the corona in the first place so there is no better solution than diving in the corona to collect the information we need to understand how it all works.
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When preparing news, materials from the following publications were used:
