Almost no one writes about it Parker Solar Probe again.
Certainly, the spacecraft received attention at launch. After all, it is the fastest moving object humans have ever built. At top speed, aided by the sun's gravity, the probe reached 430,000 miles per hour, or more than one-sixth of one percent of the speed of light. That speed will get you from New York City to Tokyo in less than a minute.
And the Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being NASA's first spacecraft named after a living person. At the time of launch, in August 2018, physicist Eugene Parker was 91 years old.
But in the six years since the probe flew through outer space and followed the sun? Not much. Let's face it, the astrophysical properties of the sun and its complex structure are not something most people think about on a daily basis.
But the tiny probe—weighing less than a ton and its scientific payload only about 110 pounds (50 kilograms)—is about to turn star. Quite literally. On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach to the sun. It will arrive just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the sun's surface, entering the solar atmosphere for the first time.
Yeah, it's going to be pretty hot here. Scientists estimate that the probe's heat shield will withstand temperatures exceeding 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,371 C) on Christmas Eve, almost the opposite of the North Pole.
Go straight to the source
I spoke with NASA's chief science officer, Nicky Fox, to understand why the probe was so tortured. Before moving to NASA headquarters, Fox was a project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, and she explained that scientists really wanted to understand the origin of the solar wind.
This is a stream of charged particles emitted from the sun's outermost layer, the corona. Scientists have wondered about this particular mystery for more than half a century, Fox explains.
“It's very simple, we want to find out where the solar wind comes from,” she said.
Back in the 1950s, before we had satellites or spacecraft to measure the sun's properties, Parker predicted the existence of this type of solar wind. The scientific community was quite skeptical about the idea – in fact, many ridiculed Parker – until the Mariner 2 mission began measuring the solar wind in 1962.
As the scientific community began to accept Parker's theory, they wanted to know more about the solar wind, the fundamental component of the entire solar system. Although the solar wind is not visible to the naked eye, when you see auroras on Earth, it is the solar wind interacting with the Earth's magnetosphere in a particularly intense way.