With a launch date
set for this morning from Florida’s Space Coast, scientists discuss the historic NASA Parker Solar Probe that will attempt to come closer to the sun than any man-made object ever has.
Eugene Parker could not say definitively whether the Parker Solar Probe launch from Cape Canaveral will be a success.
But the 91-year-old physicist wasn’t hedging his bets Thursday.
“I will believe there is a successful launch when there is a successful launch,” said Parker, who the mission is named after. “But I’ll betcha 10 bucks it succeeds.”
In one of the more ambitious science missions in the modern space era, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will attempt to come closer to the sun than any manmade object ever has.
The satellite’s course comes within 3.8 million miles of the sun by December 2024. The closest any other spacecraft has come was the Helios B probe, which came within 27 million miles on April 17, 1976.
The mission will be a hot one, with the probe’s carbon composite shield having to face temperatures exceeding 2,500 degrees at one point. That’s more than 18 times the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth.
The spacecraft’s 26 approaches to the sun during its six-year mission could begin in November.
The Parker probe will trace how energy and heat move through the Sun’s corona, perhaps leading to long-sought answers about solar winds and the energy particles projected by the Milky Way’s most-visible star.
“As a technological society, what comes toward the earth matters,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s science missions.
The Parker mission has been a work in progress for decades, with technology only recently yielding material strong enough to withstand a red-hot flyby, said project scientist Nicky Fox of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab.
“We had to wait for our technology to catch up with our dreams,” she said.
The launch, originally scheduled for 2015, has been delayed further in recent weeks. The mission had been planned for Aug. 4 and then Aug. 6 before technical problems delayed the launch until before dawn today.
A plan for media to preview the spacecraft last month was scrapped because of a “minor tubing leak” in ground support equipment.
The Parker Probe represents the first NASA spacecraft to be named after a living person.
As he held court Thursday, Parker said this week’s launch will be the first he has ever seen in person.
He also said his interest in the sun came long ago when he started researching the origins of one of its more-distinct features: sunspots.
“I thought, ‘Well, we ought to be able to figure it out in a couple of years,’ ” he said. “That was 1948.”