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Forum:Satellites - Robotic Probes
Topic:Parker Solar Probe: Questions and comments
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Robert PearlmanNASA video
NASA's historic Parker Solar Probe mission will launch in summer 2018 to travel through the sun's atmosphere, closer to the solar surface than any spacecraft before it, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions — and you can send your name along for the ride.

To commemorate humanity's first visit to the star we live with, NASA invites the public to submit their names to be included on a microchip headed to the Sun aboard NASA's Parker Solar Probe.

Robert PearlmanNASA release
More Than 1.1 Million Names Installed on NASA's Parker Solar Probe

Throughout its seven-year mission, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will swoop through the Sun's atmosphere 24 times, getting closer to our star than any spacecraft has gone before. The spacecraft will carry more than scientific instruments on this historic journey — it will also hold more than 1.1 million names submitted by the public to go to the Sun.

Above: A memory card containing 1,137,202 names submitted by the public to travel to the Sun was installed on Parker Solar Probe on May 18, 2018. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman)

"Parker Solar Probe is going to revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, the only star we can study up close," said Nicola Fox, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland. "It's fitting that as the mission undertakes one of the most extreme journeys of exploration ever tackled by a human-made object, the spacecraft will also carry along the names of so many people who are cheering it on its way."

Back in March 2018, the public were invited to send their names to the Sun aboard humanity's first mission to "touch" a star. A total of 1,137,202 names were submitted and confirmed over the seven-and-a-half-week period, and a memory card containing the names was installed on the spacecraft on May 18, 2018, three months before the scheduled launch on July 31, 2018, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The card was mounted on a plaque bearing a dedication to and a quote from the mission's namesake, heliophysicist Eugene Parker, who first theorized the existence of the solar wind. This is the first NASA mission to be named for a living individual.

This memory card also carries photos of Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, and a copy of his groundbreaking 1958 scientific paper. Parker proposed a number of concepts about how stars — including our Sun — give off material. He called this cascade of energy and particles the solar wind, a constant outflow of material from the Sun that we now know shapes everything from the habitability of worlds to our solar system's interaction with the rest of the galaxy.

Above: In addition to a chip containing submitted names, the plaque installed on the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft also contains a dedication to and quote from Eugene Parker, the mission's namesake. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman)

Parker Solar Probe will explore the Sun's outer atmosphere and make critical observations to answer decades-old questions about the physics of stars. The resulting data may also improve forecasts of major eruptions on the Sun and subsequent space weather events that impact life on Earth, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.

Though our understanding of the Sun and the solar wind has vastly improved since Parker first theorized the solar wind, there are still questions left unanswered. Two of the most fundamental mysteries – which scientists hope Parker Solar Probe will help solve – are the coronal heating problem and the mechanism behind solar wind acceleration.

The coronal heating problem is what scientists call the apparent mismatch between the temperature of the Sun's photosphere — the visible "surface," measuring about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit — and the much higher temperature of the corona — the Sun's atmosphere, which reaches temperatures of up to 10 million degrees Fahrenheit. Since the Sun's energy source is at its core, this increase is similar to walking away from a campfire and suddenly feeling a thousand times hotter — completely counterintuitive. This implies that some other process is continually adding more heat to that solar atmosphere.

Scientists think that the mechanism behind this as-yet unexplained heating happens in the lower corona — and Parker Solar Probe will get closer to this region than any spacecraft has before. Getting a closer look at this region should help scientists identify the source of this coronal heating, along with pinpointing the process that accelerates the solar wind to enormous speeds as it leaves the Sun.

Above: The plaque containing names submitted to travel to the Sun is mounted below Parker Solar Probe's high-gain antenna (the round object with gray covering), which the spacecraft will use to transmit data back to Earth. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman)

A commemorative reproduction of the plaque bearing an identical memory card — minus the submitted names — was presented to Parker at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in October 2017 by the mission team.

"From the experience of seeing the probe up close, I understand now the difficult task you are undertaking, and I am sure you will succeed," said Parker after visiting the spacecraft in the clean room.

Robert PearlmanSome photos from the rollback of the mobile service tower at Launch Complex 37 earlier this evening (Aug. 10):

Robert PearlmanSpectacular successful launch of NASA's Parker Solar Probe at 3:31 a.m. on Sunday (Aug. 12)!

denali414That was an impressive launch! Had taped it last night, nothing like waking up in the morning to a rocket taking off for space.
Robert PearlmanThis is the first NASA mission that has been named for a living individual, Dr. Eugene Parker, who was present in Florida for his first in-person rocket launch. NASA photos (credit: Glenn Benson and Bill Ingalls):
NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate Thomas Zurbuchen, left, American solar astrophysicist, and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, Eugene Parker, center, and President and Chief Executive Officer for United Launch Alliance Tory Bruno pose for a group photo in front of the ULA Delta IV Heavy rocket with NASA's Parker Solar onboard, Friday, Aug. 10, 2018, Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

Dr. Eugene Parker, a pioneer in heliophysics and S. Chandrasekhar distinguished service professor emeritus for the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, watches the launch of NASA's Parker Solar Probe.

Robert PearlmanNASA release
Parker Solar Probe Offers Stunning View of Venus

NASA's Parker Solar Probe captured stunning views of Venus during its close flyby of the planet in July 2020.

Though Parker Solar Probe's focus is the Sun, Venus plays a critical role in the mission: The spacecraft whips by Venus a total of seven times over the course of its seven-year mission, using the planet's gravity to bend the spacecraft's orbit. These Venus gravity assists allow Parker Solar Probe to fly closer and closer to the Sun on its mission to study the dynamics of the solar wind close to its source.

Above: When flying past Venus in July 2020, Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instrument, short for Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow — light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface.

Bright streaks in WISPR, such as the ones seen here, are typically caused by a combination of charged particles — called cosmic rays — sunlight reflected by grains of space dust, and particles of material expelled from the spacecraft's structures after impact with those dust grains. The number of streaks varies along the orbit or when the spacecraft is traveling at different speeds, and scientists are still in discussion about the specific origins of the streaks here.

The dark spot appearing on the lower portion of Venus is an artifact from the WISPR instrument. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher)

But — along with the orbital dynamics — these passes can also yield some unique and even unexpected views of the inner solar system. During the mission's third Venus gravity assist on July 11, 2020, the onboard Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR, captured a striking image of the planet's nightside from 7,693 miles away.

WISPR is designed to take images of the solar corona and inner heliosphere in visible light, as well as images of the solar wind and its structures as they approach and fly by the spacecraft. At Venus, the camera detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow — light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. The feature appears dark because of its lower temperature, about 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) cooler than its surroundings.

That aspect of the image took the team by surprise, said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, who coordinated a WISPR imaging campaign with Japan's Venus-orbiting Akatsuki mission. "WISPR is tailored and tested for visible light observations. We expected to see clouds, but the camera peered right through to the surface."

"WISPR effectively captured the thermal emission of the Venusian surface," said Brian Wood, an astrophysicist and WISPR team member from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "It's very similar to images acquired by the Akatsuki spacecraft at near-infrared wavelengths."

This surprising observation sent the WISPR team back to the lab to measure the instrument's sensitivity to infrared light. If WISPR can indeed pick up near-infrared wavelengths of light, the unforeseen capability would provide new opportunities to study dust around the Sun and in the inner solar system. If it can't pick up extra infrared wavelengths, then these images — showing signatures of features on Venus' surface — may have revealed a previously unknown "window" through the Venusian atmosphere.

"Either way," Vourlidas said, "some exciting science opportunities await us."

Above: NASA's Parker Solar Probe had an up-close view of Venus when it flew by the planet in July 2020. Some of the features seen by scientists are labeled in this annotated image. The dark spot appearing on the lower portion of Venus is an artifact from the WISPR instrument. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher)

For more insight into the July 2020 images, the WISPR team planned a set of similar observations of the Venusian nightside during Parker Solar Probe's latest Venus flyby on Feb. 20, 2021. Mission team scientists expect to receive and process that data for analysis by the end of April.

"We are really looking forward to these new images," said Javier Peralta, a planetary scientist from the Akatsuki team, who first suggested a Parker Solar Probe campaign with Akatsuki, which has been in orbiting Venus since 2015. "If WISPR can sense the thermal emission from the surface of Venus and nightglow — most likely from oxygen — at the limb of the planet, it can make valuable contributions to studies of the Venusian surface."

SpaceAholicNASA's Parker Solar Probe has taken its first visible light images of the surface of Venus from space.
Smothered in thick clouds, Venus' surface is usually shrouded from sight. But in two recent flybys of the planet, Parker used its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, to capture the entire nightside in wavelengths of the visible spectrum – the type of light that the human eye can see – and extending into the near-infrared.

The images, combined into a video, reveal a faint glow from the surface that shows distinctive features like continental regions, plains and plateaus. A luminescent halo of oxygen in the atmosphere can also be seen surrounding the planet.

"We're thrilled with the science insights Parker Solar Probe has provided thus far," said Nicola Fox, director for the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. "Parker continues to outperform our expectations, and we are excited that these novel observations taken during our gravity assist maneuver can help advance Venus research in unexpected ways."

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