NASA solar spacecraft snaps first image from inside sun’s atmosphere

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which was launched aboard a Delta IV-Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Aug. 12, 2018, and is on a mission to answer some questions solar researchers have of our Sun. On Dec. 12, 2018, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C., several researchers met to share what they hope to learn from Parker Solar Probe. During a press conference held at the event, they released an information brief of what they had received from the probe so far.

Over 12 days in October and November, Parker Solar Probe completed its first solar encounter phase, speeding through the Sun’s outer atmosphere at a mere 16.9 million miles from the surface of the sun, and collected an amazing amount of data with the four suites of cutting-edge instruments it had onboard. This data started downlinking back to NASA as of Dec. 7 2018 and it included an image from it’s onboard probe — WISPR.

WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) took an amazing image inside of the corna on Nov. 8, 2018, at 1:12 a.m. EST. The image shows two distinct jets of solar material, known as coronal streamers, emanating from the left of the image. That bright spot in the distance is gas giant Jupiter, while the black spots are artifacts of background correction.

Because of the relative positions of Parker Solar Probe, the Sun and Earth and their effects on radio transmission, some of the science data from this encounter will not downlink until after the mission’s second solar encounter in April 2019. All indications report that good scientific data was collected so we might be seeing some more phenomenal images taken by WISPR.

Photo credit: NASA

Source: Asgardia Space News