It is ridiculously hard to try and direct anything from Earth straight towards the Sun because our planet just won’t stop moving!
Thank goodness NASA put together a short video to explain how this will all work.
If the weather holds for launch, and your are up very early Saturday morning August 11th, HERE is the link to the NASA live stream to watch the historic mission leaving from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The PARKER SOLAR PROBE, which will travel faster than any other human-constructed object ever, and will make its journey to the Sun over the course of seven years. It will try to withstand extreme heat and radiation, to actually make contact with the Sun’s outer atmosphere. In order to unlock the mysteries of the corona, but also “to protect a society that is increasingly dependent on technology from the threats of space weather, NASA will send Parker Solar Probe to “touch” the sun.”
WHO IS PARKER? And how did he get a probe named after him?
In 2017, the mission was renamed for Eugene Parker, the S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. In the 1950s, Parker proposed a number of concepts about how stars—including our Sun—give off energy. He called this cascade of energy the solar wind, and he described an entire complex system of plasmas, magnetic fields, and energetic particles that make up this phenomenon. Parker also theorized an explanation for the super-heated solar atmosphere, the corona, which is – contrary to what was expected by physics laws — hotter than the surface of the sun itself. This is the first NASA mission that has been named for a living individual.
Susan Saunders-8/10/18
