Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe survives close encounter with sun to send home surprising findings
- ‘Spectacular trove’ of data on super-hot corona collected by car-sized spacecraft
- Probe reveals new information on solar wind as scientists seek to solve mysteries of space weather
Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe, having survived its closest encounter so far with the sun, has sent back a “spectacular trove” of data on its corona, the super-hot outer edge of its atmosphere, scientists said on Wednesday.
The car-sized probe, launched in August last year, will come within some 6 million kilometres (4 million miles) of the sun’s surface during a series of fly-bys at other distances and trajectories over seven years.
It is hoped it will allow a better understanding of the solar wind and electromagnetic storms, which can cause chaos on Earth by knocking out the power grid.
One puzzle concerns the corona itself, which at 1 million degrees Celsius is many times hotter than the sun’s surface at 6,000 degrees, when it would normally be expected to cool the further from the heat source.
“So the corona finds a way to heat up. We are looking at the physical processes which allow that to happen,” said Alexis Rouillard at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and co-author of one of four reports on the probe’s initial findings published in the journal Nature.