NASA yesterday postponed until today the launch of the first spacecraft that is to fly directly toward the sun on a mission to plunge into our star’s sizzling atmosphere and unlock its mysteries.
The reason for the delay was not immediately clear, but was called for after a gaseous helium alarm was sounded in the final moments before liftoff, officials said.
Engineers were taking the utmost caution with the US$1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe, which NASA Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen described as one of the agency’s most “strategically important missions.”
Photo: AFP / NASA / Bill Ingalls
The next launch window opens today at 3:31pm Taiwan time, when weather conditions are 60 percent favorable for a launch, NASA said.
By going closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history, the uncrewed probe’s main goal is to unveil the secrets of the corona, the unusual atmosphere around the star.
Not only is the corona about 300 times hotter than the sun’s surface, but it also hurls powerful plasma and energetic particles that can unleash geomagnetic space storms, wreaking havoc on Earth by disrupting power grids.
These solar outbursts are poorly understood, but pack the potential to wipe out power to millions of people.
The probe is protected by an ultra-powerful heat shield that is 11.43cm thick. The shield should enable the spacecraft to survive its close shave with the fiery star, traveling to within 6.16 million kilometers of the sun’s surface.
The heat shield was built to withstand radiation equivalent to up to about 500 times the sun’s radiation on Earth.
Even in a region where temperatures can reach more than 555,538°C, sunlight is expected to heat the shield to only about 1,371°C.
If all works as planned, the inside of the spacecraft should stay at just 29.4°C.
“The sun is full of mysteries,” said Nicky Fox, project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
The tools on board are to measure the expanding corona and continually flowing atmosphere known as the solar wind, which solar physicist Eugene Parker first described in 1958.
Parker, now 91, recalled that at first, some people did not believe in his theory.
However, the launch of NASA’s Mariner 2 spacecraft in 1962 — becoming the first robotic spacecraft to make a successful planetary encounter — proved them wrong.
“It was just a matter of sitting out the deniers for four years until the Venus Mariner 2 spacecraft showed that, by golly, there was a solar wind,” Parker said earlier this week.
Parker said he was “impressed” by the Parker Solar Probe, calling it “a very complex machine.”
Parker is an “incredible hero of our scientific community,” Zurbuchen said.
“Life is all about these big arcs. Sometimes you just see, like how over a lifetime, things just come together and create these amazing stories, these leaps going forward,” he said.
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