Parker Solar Probe, Take the Solar Plunge |
Parker Solar Probe, Take the Solar Plunge |
Dec 25 2005, 12:33 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
Any serious plans to send a probe into the Sun to explore its depths as far as possible?
What would help a probe last as long as it could and how deep could it get? Could it even radio or laser out any data? What about a Sun skimmer? -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Dec 27 2005, 08:36 AM
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Guests |
The trouble is that we haven't as yet come up with a way to collect and store it that's even remotely as efficient as utilizing -- at breakneck pace -- the fossil fuels that Mother Nature thoughtfully spent hundreds of millions of years accumulating for us. Talk about spendthrift heirs!
As for solar astronomy missions -- including Solar Probe -- they may have genuine practical importance. We need to know more about the Sun's longer-term activity cycles, in order to judge what effects those will have on Earth's climate that will be overlaid on top of the effects from the buildup of man-made greenhouse gases. And, yep, the idea of Solar Probe has been around for a long, long time. Back in the early 1980s it was a big hulking thing called Starprobe that weighed thousands of kg and would have had to be launched by a Titan. Then, in the early 1990s, someone developed a way of greatly shrinking it by shaping the heat shield in such a way that it doubled as the probe's high-gain antenna. Still later, however, it became clear that electronic miniaturization has advanced to the point that we don't need that peculiar idea to build a lightweight version of Solar Probe. As with ion drives, We Have The Technology, and the only thing stopping us from doing it is the cost. And Congress itself has repeatedly expressed some interest in this mission, and at least twice has inserted an additional $10 million into NASA's budget -- which NASA hadn't asked for -- for design studies. At some point, it WILL fly. (The analogy that comes to mind is SIRTF, which got delayed repeatedly, but in the process underwent technological evolution that both drastically reduced its cost AND increased its science output. And finally, it did fly, as the extremely successful Spitzer Space Telescope.) One of the more mind-boggling things about this mission, by the way, is that one of its goals is to take images of the solar corona -- from inside the corona, looking out. |
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