The first thing that struck me about NASA’s Parker Solar Probe “touching” the Sun is how far the Sun’s upper atmosphere stretches—about 8.6 million miles or over 13.8 million kilometers. That upper atmosphere is called the corona. In other words, the Sun’s atmosphere stretches nearly a tenth of Earth’s average distance from it—about 91 million miles or 150 million kilometers. That scale is mindboggling even within the scale of the universe that is beyond comprehension.
The first ever human probe touching the Sun at 8.1 million miles or about 13 million kilometers is an astonishing scientific and technological accomplishment for NASA. I am not sure if the probe has cameras on it but what a sight it would be to look at the Sun from such close quarters. Parker is expected to flyby even closer, its closest in fact, by 2025 at 3.83 million miles or 6.1 million kilometers. Beyond the complex science coming out of Parker’s flybys what I am drawn particularly to is the sheer visual spectacle that it presents at such a close distance. Of course, to the naked eye it would be an unmanageably blinding gigantic white orb.
When you consider that we are everything the Sun lets us be, you realize how thrilling Parker’s flybys are.
A NASA story said this about the science Parker is producing: “As it circles closer to the solar surface, Parker is making new discoveries that other spacecraft were too far away to see, including from within the solar wind – the flow of particles from the Sun that can influence us at Earth. In 2019, Parker discovered that magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind, called switchbacks, are plentiful close to the Sun. But how and where they form remained a mystery. Halving the distance to the Sun since then, Parker Solar Probe has now passed close enough to identify one place where they originate: the solar surface.”
“Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere – the corona – that we never could before,” said Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “We see evidence of being in the corona in magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in images. We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.”
Unfortunately, back on Earth we are currently troubled by a different kind of corona which is too small for the human eye unlike the Sun’s which is too big for it.
In case you wonder what earthly benefits Parker might produce through its measurements of the switchbacks and other phenomena, consider this: “Such measurements from the corona will be critical for understanding and forecasting extreme space weather events that can disrupt telecommunications and damage satellites around Earth.”
So next time your Internet gets knocked out and you are not able to watch YouTube videos of a cat playing the piano or a porn star climaxing but coitus interrupted, you know that solar winds have been particularly intense.
